When output is low and input is high, productivity is very low. Improve quality and you reverse this situation. Output goes up, input goes down, and productivity shoots up. The idea to build quality by inspection is wrong and the results are poor quality and high costs. Doctor W. Edwards Deming is best known for his work in Japan, which commenced in 1950, and created a revolution in quality and economic production.
In 1998 MAXImolding, a division of Jacobsen Real-Time X-Ray Machinery Inc., adopted his approach - build quality by prevention of defects - by understanding and tuning up the manufacturing process, and focusing on the cause of the defects. In 2001 light alloy wheel manufacturing process was analyzed and fine-tuned at UBE factory in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada with specific focus on reducing the causes of the defects.
Putting theory into practice
To accomplish this, first manual x-ray picture feedback was used to set up the casting machines to produce fewer defects in the first place. While this approach is possible, it requires a very skilled level of people involved with setup of the machine and process. Firstly, the person interpreting images of wheel must be an expert in analyses of the x-ray imagery, and then the same person or different must be expert in process adjustments and interpretation of the inspection findings.
The second person must take the quality inspected part and convert the knowledge about the actual part into a set of relevant parameters that can be applied to input of the machine to hopefully produce new part with better and more exact quality characteristics. This was a reason why this method was not adopted on a large scale.
To mitigate these challenges, a further leap step improvement was necessary, but was not possible with existing casting machines. Therefore in summer of 2006 from scratch a totally new vertical semi-solid machine was developed. An operator on a casting machine should be replaced and a fully automated self-learning digital foundry was born.
