Lean and Green Foundry Operations.

We are lean practitioners. We walk the walk. For us 5S is more than just sweeping five times. We have sorted, straightened, standardized, and set in order. We sustain, but we do not spend a lot of time at this phase. We want to go back and figure out what we missed the last time through. We audit and we audit our audits. We are just never satisfied. We hold Kaizen events. We know what poke-a yoke is. (It’s not an animated kids show.) We have created cells and cut set up times by 90%. Waste is the enemy. We relentlessly search for and destroy waste.

Muda is money. We recently did a lean project in our cleaning room. We discovered that only 1/7th of the time we touched a casting were we adding value to it. We fixed it. We created flow and eliminated waste. Now when we touch a casting we make it better. The best part is that it used to take as much as a week for a casting to get through the cleaning room. Now it takes hours. It is a major factor in our ability to offer best in class lead times.

We are green. We define green as maximizing sustainability practices. Waste in energy and landfill streams is harmful to our bottom line and to our environment. We have instituted multiple successful programs to eliminate landfill waste.

We recently invested a significant amount of capital in airset shakeout and sand reclaim equipment. Since that time we have been pushing to increase the reutilization of sand. We declared that our goal was to never landfilll a grain of sand if it still had utility somewhere in the foundry. Recently we achieved our step goal of using 92% reclaimed sand in our airset system. Our next goal is 95%. Ultimately we want to get so the only new sand additions come from cores. Now we're figuring out how to use reclaim sand in our cold box process. Our shakeout equipment reduces the cores to granular sand and that gets reclaimed along with the rest.