Collecting data in the foundry, “Foundry 4.0”, Artificial Intelligent, Digitalization, on the way to the Smart Foundry and then, so what do we do with all the data, the ideas and good advice in practice?
"The foundry is basically something very special! The casting process is one of the few production processes in which a part is created by a liquid and it is a real challenge to master this process properly ", this is how it is in short in many foundries explains Ronald Kreft, Managing Director at RGU GmbH. Now and since personal meetings are possible again, we arranged to meet at their headquarters in Dortmund for a discussion, connected online was also the managing partner of RGU Asia, Christian Kleeberg, who looks after APAC, the Middle East and South Africa with his team, joining us from Singapore.
It's always about the basic structure - even in the foundry!
No matter how things go, you have to be prepared or you will have problems, no matter what, the basic structure has to be right and RGU has been dealing with this since the late 1990s. Initially for different industrial sectors, but very soon with a focus on the foundry industry.
Ronald Kreft and his 35 employees in Dortmund know what they are doing, because they deal with integrated software solutions for the foundry industry and when data is collected, then a real plan is needed and the courage to implement it.
The company's founders were already thinking about how to map foundry processes back then, the complete production process starting from a request for quotation downright to the casting with certification, with full software platform support, all this resulted in the creation of the "resource plan", which is now identical to the "Digital Twin" approach.
Truly ahead of their time, they included production planning and controlling, cost-controlling and cost-planning to the resource plan, and that was the birth of FRP® - Foundry Resource Planning.
All RGU employees have a connection to the foundry and to software and concentrate exclusively on software solutions for the foundry industry. In doing so, RGU offers different solutions that are all oriented towards the "Digital Twin" concept. These solutions can cover sub-areas, be standardized (corporate) solutions or tailormade individually and then be used at different levels: