Equipment underutilization can have a negative impact on profitability, which might hamper the purchasing power of people by increasing the price of goods and commodities.
FREMONT, CA: Heat treatment, brazing, and metal polishing are essential for ensuring components' performance in various applications. Without adequate thermal processing, safety-critical parts like automobile seat belt components, hot-section engine parts in airplanes, and weapons assembly risk failing in the field, putting people's lives (and the company's future) in danger. If the furnace conditions cannot adjust promptly, operations will immediately stop, and parts will be quarantined for quality inspection. Operators may overload machinery to boost production, hiding parts or preventing austenitizing. Following is the list of challenges faced by operators:
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Equipment failure and operator error: Manual controls risk human mistakes. If an operator forgets to change the temperature or other parameters on their equipment, they may obtain a batch of out-of-spec parts that need reprocessing or scrapping. They have yet to find thermal processing equipment that runs indefinitely without maintenance. Operators may increase heat above the recipe if a furnace runs cold to reach the correct temperature. This interim technique to heat treat items has its drawbacks. This unplanned downtime might increase lead times and reduce flexibility for emergency or overflow orders if they engage with a commercial heat treater.
Inefficient scheduling: Heat treaters must learn efficient, smart scheduling when boosting throughput and meeting short turnaround times. Smart schedulers will consider several parameters, including the precedence of future orders and the required furnace recovery time between each batch of parts. For instance, if an operation processes the batch of components requiring the highest temperature at the start of the shift, it must wait until the equipment has cooled to the right temperature before processing the following batch. Equipment underutilization can have a negative impact on profitability, which might express itself to customers as price hikes.
Raw material variations: Casting houses and foundries use numerous alloying components to make pieces. When alloying components have differing melt rates, a human operator must mix materials in a furnace, which can be challenging. Magnesium is famously difficult to dissolve with other metals. Some manufacturers swap materials without telling their heat-treating partner, which produces surprising outcomes. If the fault is with the raw material, the thermal processor can't fix it, and they'll have to wait for fresh materials from their suppliers to create new parts.
Out-of-spec parts entering the supply chain: Poor thermal processing can lead to field use of completed parts. Safety-critical automotive and aerospace parts are severely affected. It can trigger expensive recalls, severe fines, and catastrophic mishaps that harm or kill end-users. Many industrial organizations would struggle to thrive without substantial difficulty.
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