This specific Green Belt Project was completed at Pemco Die Cast company by Randy Ryder, the Engineering Manager. This project required of a lot of data collection in an unusual way.  It wasn’t just about reviewing the numbers on paper.

The project focused on a part with an average scrap rate of 20.1% and it was mostly poor fill and blisters – porosity. The location of the poor fill and the blisters appeared on this part for hundreds of pieces of scrap. After identifying this small detail, a pattern immediately developed. The location of the defect was the old Pareto rule and appeared in 2 or 3 major areas.

The majority of theses defects were fed by the center runner – or you could look at it that the center runner fed the highest concentration of defects. In order to fix this issue, the feed runner was adapted to a uniform depth (as opposed to a slight taper) to extend the heat and liquid phase of the top center gate hoping to improve fill and intensification.

The scrap rate dropped in HALF! And the scrap rate for blisters and poor fill dropped by 75%!

This project is s great example that sometimes collecting data is not about numbers, but about looking deeper and analyzing parts to see if a pattern emerges.