You want your parts in two weeks. Metalcasting suppliers weigh in on the variables that affect how soon you actually will receive them.

Shannon Wetzel, Senior Editor

(Click here to see the story as it appears in the March/April issue of Metal Casting Design & Purchasing.)

When your parts will be delivered is a big criterion during the casting supplier selection process, and those timelines for delivery can vary from supplier to supplier and month to month. What causes the fluctuations?

Casting suppliers calculate their lead time in different ways, but they often take into account the percentage they are running at capacity (either in volume or sales dollars), orders placed for the next few weeks or months and future orders expected based on conversations with existing customers with long-range plans. Following are additional factors about your parts that will affect how quickly it can be at your warehouse dock. 

1. When the order is placed.

Lead time, in this case referring to the amount of time between when an order is placed and when the castings are delivered, is more than just how long it takes to make a casting. A considerable portion of the lead time is affected by how busy the casting supplier is and how many jobs are ahead of yours in the plant. It may be frustrating, but this time fluctuates throughout the year.

“Lead time is not a function of time to manufacture, it is the certainty of facility availability,” said George Boyd Sr., president of Goldens’ Foundry & Machine, Columbus, Ga. “If you ask me today what’s my lead time on a no-core, gray iron part, I would say, ‘Do you want it Friday?’  But three months from now, I might tell you 10 weeks. It’s about how many commitments I have.”

This is an important consideration to remember when you make first inquiries on a supplier’s lead time. The current lead time is not usually guaranteed a few months down the road, and without an order placed, you could lose your place in line.

And, if your manufacturing facility is running at full capacity and having trouble keeping up with demand, it’s a good chance all your suppliers—not just the metalcasting facilities—will be full with orders, as well.
“Usually the customer is prepared for longer lead times if business is generally strong,” said David Howell, owner, AlumAlloy Co. Inc., Ontario, Calif.

2. How much scheduling and future order information you share.

Metal casting suppliers juggle casting orders from dozens, sometimes hundreds of customers at a time with different testing requirements, complexities, materials and volumes. The more they know about your plans, the better they can slot you in the schedule. Casting facilities operate most efficiently when they can line up similar jobs together to reduce the time needed to set up a new order. For instance, casting facilities will want to pour jobs of the same alloy one day and jobs in another alloy a different day, so time isn’t wasted changing the furnaces or resources aren’t used to keep multiple alloys melted, charged and ready to be poured. 

“Order early so you reserve your place in the schedule, give a firm order, and give good visibility on production needs [for better lead times],” said George Boyd Jr., vice president, Goldens’ Foundry & Machine.

As Boyd Sr. explained, giving six months’ visibility—an estimate of orders you expect to place but have not yet—helps the casting facility plan ahead to allot capacity for that probable order.
“You are not obligated for those six months’ visibility, I’m on the hook,” he said. “But if you don’t tell me about them and I end up committing my capacity for someone else, you’re in a difficult place.”

3. How well the part fits the casting supplier’s operations.

Metalcasting facilities have a zone of operation in which their process and schedule runs at its smoothest. If your part fits within that zone, you should see few delays in delivery. If your part is a bad match—either too big, too complex, too many or too few—your delivery may suffer.

When a supplier turns down a job, it is often because it doesn’t fit the metalcaster’s optimal parameters. In that case, another supplier with a different “zone of operation” may be better suited and able to deliver your parts in a shorter, more reliable time frame.

“We reject the RFQs that come to our plant that don’t fit our marketing niche,” said Rob Peaslee, president, Manitowoc Grey Iron, Manitowoc, Wis. “No matter if we are busy or slow, we don’t stray from our marketing strategy.”

4. How much engineering work the casting supplier needs to do to the computer model from the customer.

“The engineers out of schools now are wonderful engineers that know little about the casting process,” Peaslee said. “They don’t understand idiosyncrasies like shrink or where to put draft. We have people here who can fix it from a casting perspective, but it takes time.”

The casting supplier must figure out how to flow the liquid metal into a mold to produce the part represented in the model. Often this will require design change requests from the supplier to make casting the part feasible, more cost effective or just plain easier.

For customers, most casting knowledge will come from experience, which is hard to gain. Close collaboration with suppliers during the design phase, when they are determining how to feed the molten metal into the mold or releasing the pattern from the mold, will build that knowledge. It may not reduce lead time for that part, but it could lead to fewer design changes for the next part.

5. Complexity of the part.

A part that does not require a core needs only the set of tools to make the pattern for the mold. Add a core, and tooling to make that core must be made. Add additional cores, additional tooling must be designed, built and tested.

“You do have to do the engineering. Even if you have a model, you have to modify it for draft. You have to build models for the cores. It can be a lengthy process,” Boyd Sr. said. “Lead time for a part with no core might be four to six weeks compared to 16 weeks for a multi-cored part.”

6. Part volume.

The more a casting supplier knows about future orders, the better it can schedule the deliveries and plan for optimal tooling for the job upfront. If your metalcaster knows you will need a regular delivery of castings throughout a year, it can slot the job in when it makes the most sense from a production standpoint. Sometimes the supplier will build up an inventory of parts for you so it can ship instantly when the order is placed.

“If I have a customer who I make 100 castings a week for, he will have quick lead times because I can see his orders and maybe I can accumulate some inventory,” Boyd Jr. said. “The buyer who gets into trouble is the one who orders two weeks out. If I have no future orders for him, he moves to the back of the schedule.”

Knowing the future production schedule will also impact tooling design.

“We look at the least expensive tooling for the amount of castings needed,” Peaslee said. “There is a big difference between 500 and 5,000.”

Your casting supplier may consider using multicavity tooling—where multiple parts are cast in a single mold—if the volume is high enough. More castings made at once reduces time of manufacture and cost.

7. Amount of testing required.

More tests means more time. “The level of PPAP (production part approval process) required will affect how long it will take in the system,” Peaslee said. “If the customer is asking for a lot beyond X-rays, it extends the timeframe more and more.”

The number of tests and how many parts need to be tested affects lead time by more than just the time to do each individual test. When too many parts don’t fail inspection, they have to be remade to fill the order, so there is a risk factor that may figure into the lead time calculation.

“Delivery times are affected if you have to run the parts twice,” Howell said. “We do parts for the U.S. Navy, and they sometimes don’t understand that deliveries are slow because they put difficult requirements on the parts. So, it’s not just the time to do the X-ray testing, but also some time to make the additional parts.”

In some specifications, the term “foundry control” is used. This is where the metalcasting facility performs all required inspections on preproduction castings. If failures occur, the metalcaster adjusts the gating and riser design for other batches of castings until 100% of the castings pass all of the inspections. Then the casting facility will run the balance of the order.

“Establishment of foundry control means if we pour the metal at this temperature with this gating and riser setup, the parts will pass,” Howell said. “The foundry agrees it won’t change the technique. It might take a week or two up front, but you save time and money by establishing foundry control instead of needing a certain amount of X-ray inspection for every lot of parts that are cast.”

8. Number of value-added services provided.

A metalcasting facility that can handle the machining, painting, assembly or other additional services means you don’t have to deal with those additional vendors. The casting supplier will do the work for you, but it will add to how long it will take to receive delivery of your parts. And if the metalcaster is outsourcing the services, they will be susceptible to those lead times, as well.

“We have started asking our suppliers to give us their lead times so we can build in the amount of time to finish the parts,” Peaslee said. “We have had to put in a system to track those casting to make sure they are staying on schedule. Not a whole lot of people out there paint or heat treat, so they do get backed up.”

Metalcasters want to stick to the schedule they have established so they can operate efficiently and deliver parts to all their customers in a timely fashion, but many will help out a good customer with an emergency order when they are in a pinch.

“When the chips are down, we can work over time and negotiate faster deliveries from heat treaters and inspection labs. We have customers who often need a few castings quickly for a show. We can fast track their parts for an additional price,” Howell said. “As long as it is a single run, we can usually do it.”

A good relationship with your supplier will help your case for those times you need parts sooner than the metalcaster’s published lead time.

“Casting buyers don’t buy castings from foundries. They buy castings from people who operate foundries. If casting buyers have a good relationship with those people, they will find their lead time, collaboration, everything, is better,” Boyd Jr. said. “If casting buyers think they are just dealing with an impersonal entity they are likely to find they are treated the same way. Relationships matter.”