9/24/2016 12:59:00 AM by Calmet - Iron Castings Foundry, Forgings, Machined Parts, Stampings, Assemblies, Tubing
Just In Time Delivery Of Iron Castings:
Casting buyers keep moving forward for long-term business ties with a few foundries that are reliable rather than short-term cost based purchase agreements with several foundries. In order to maintain a long term partnership, an ideal professional metal caster must be able to establish his business through diversification of his customer base and market space. He must be able to optimize his product in terms of a well oriented process flow mechanism and controlling system. He must be skillful in carefully choosing his workforce in both production as well as the sales department, as production alone will not guarantee success, but a competitive sales and marketing team does the rest to establish market space on the long run. All these aforementioned aspects are the key ingredients that determine the concept of Just-in-time delivery, which is the favourite term from the buyer’s perspective. Over the recent past, a lot of casting buyers and assemblers adopted this concept for the various advantages it brought to their business.
Factors Influencing Just-In-Time Delivery
The next step in the metal casting industry is this concept of Just-in-time delivery which gives a whole lot of benefits to the metal caster who works desperately to achieve a long term business partnership with some of his valued customers. By dispatching the finished product to the customer end on time, there is a reduction in inventory costs. This motivates the foundries to take frequent smaller lots while maintaining a strict schedule. Studies conducted in the past years show that this type of approach in the casting industry has reduced the inventory costs based upon the sturdy increase in the demand for products in terms of quality assurance, short lead time and smaller lots at competitive costs.
Furthermore, casting assemblers do not directly involve themselves in the process of inspection of the delivered products. They expect the vendors to be responsible for quality of the product. They expect the foundries to reduce their costs by adopting better cost effective techniques and methodologies. Other factors that are influential in terms of delivery are the safety regulations that are to be followed by the foundries, environment safety and energy conservation. By adhering to these requirements, foundries are able to deliver the products on time, thereby promoting a better and healthy workspace and a thriving business.
Achieving Just-In-Time Delivery
In general, on an average, the lead time to develop a new product including tooling development and foundry trials alone take several weeks and constitute over 65-70% of the total lead time. This can be reduced in half by adopting computer aided software for designing, tool development and process flow optimization. Moreover, it is an effective and efficient way to predict internal defects then and there. It also helps in the modification and verification of the process parameters and tool design in order to fulfill the customer’s requirements way ahead before transferring the trial casting for the purpose of physical verification. This way of rapid modeling or prototype development reduces the overall lead time, which in turn facilitates just-in-time delivery.
The conclusion is, for a foundry to establish itself amidst the tough competition in the market, it must produce directionally secure and sound castings on a trust-worthy on-time and small-lot delivery to the customer at a competitive price by all means.
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