How This Manufacturer Increased Machine Utilization By Up To 25%

In the beginning, ProCast provided casting and outsourced any additional processes, including CNC machining, heat treating, and powder coating to subcontractors. As Procast continued to grow, they began moving these processes in-house. With this new growth came new challenges, including visibility, tracking machine utilization, and meeting higher production demands.

When Procast was a smaller shop with fewer employees, everyone could easily communicate what was happening on the floor. However, as growth increased, it became difficult to keep track of where things were in production. Their production demand began to outgrow the processes they traditionally relied on. They knew their customers needed a level of assurance and support that spreadsheets could not provide.

In their first step to modernizing their business practices, the company decided to implement an ECI ERP in 2010 to improve overall visibility and production tracking. For a company that relied heavily on manual, handwritten processes and spreadsheets, an ERP that centralized and digitally tracked data was a foreign concept, but one that would pave the way for additional improvements as they digitized processes.

As ProCast continued to grow, they realized the need for real-time production monitoring when a customer of over 10 years required higher production demand that they struggled to meet. On paper, the company should have had enough capacity to accommodate the increase, but they could not quantify exactly where that capacity was.

Their journey to a modern shop floor began with Amper, ECI’s manufacturing intelligence and operations platform that provides real-time production monitoring, actionable insights, and continuous improvement capabilities with fast deployment and seamless ERP integration.

The success in CNC machining was only the beginning of ProCast’s digital transformation.  With a successful implementation and paper processes eliminated in their CNC machining operations, ProCast is ready to move the Amper implementation to their foundry facility, where output has more variables.

Within the foundry, operations have what Jim Wilson describes as a “nostalgic perception.”

“My perception of a more modern-looking foundry is more on the data collection side rather than robotics,” Jim explains. Amper will help move the needle toward modernization on this side of production, taking reports that were once handwritten to producing them electronically. With ECI ERP and Amper working together, all of ProCast’s data will be centralized into one system, helping them to understand utilization and production across the entire business.