South African foundries operate in tough conditions, supplying castings for mining, rail, energy and defence applications to customers that demand global-standard proof of the exact composition of every casting, while also faced with the challenges of rising energy costs, a narrowing skills base and shrinking margins. Meeting these complex demands requires a system that addresses specific local conditions, and South African company Foundry Software Solutions (FSS) asserts that its Foundry Management Information System (FOMIS) offers the solution.

It was developed, tested and refined over 40 years inside a working foundry by experienced foundry operators to solve the practical challenges of production planning and control, work-in-progress administration, scrap and rejection analysis, pattern and tool administration, customer and commercial management, and, critically, maintaining a chain of records, including furnace batch, alloy chemistry and heat treatment cycles, which a foundry must be able to produce on-demand to support a certified test certificate.

According to FSS, traceability and certification have become increasingly important for foundries serving safety-critical or high- value supply chains, where a certificate is only as credible as the underlying production data.

“A certified test certificate that cannot be defended against the production record it claims to describe is a liability, not an asset,” asserts FSS, noting that it has designed FOMIS to meet the required standard.

The company explains that FOMIS is not a top-down, theoretical concept created by outsiders; rather, it has been developed from within an operating foundry with input from foundry management and programmers with decades of shop-floor experience, resulting in a practical solution aimed at solving real-life production problems.

FSS says FOMIS is designed to integrate with existing systems, such as accounting, procurement, debtors, stockholding or human resource systems, already in place in foundries, while covering the technical, quality, production and certification complexities unique to metal casting that generalenterprise resource planning platforms are not able to manage.

The company notes that the South African foundry sector is hampered by small-scale operations that restrict necessary investments. It asserts that imports of castings, particularly from China and India, are reducing local production of end-products, while competition from cheaper imports reduces profitability and investment capacity. In addition, a lack of resources hinders the implementation of new technologies and digitalisation projects.

FSS says it aims to address some of these challenges with a solution that offers incremental improvement across the levers that drive foundry profitability: order intake and throughput, scrap and reject rates, productivity per labour hour, prevention of unnecessary overcasting, and tighter control of work-in-progress.

FSS quotes a once-off installation fee of R200 000 to R500 000, depending on the size of the operation, and a monthly licence fee of R30 000 to R50 000.

FSS affirms that FOMIS does not promise a single dramatic transformation but delivers compounded, incremental improvement, supported throughout by an FSS project manager, hands-on training, and ongoing customisation.

The company says that the implementation of more sophisticated technical and information management systems is indispensable for the future success of foundries in South Africa, and notes that the demand for systems such as FOMIS will grow as companies mature in data management and as the requirements for stricter certification and improved cost accounting and traceability increase.