Increasing Quality with Digital—Making Supplier Production Data Available to Improve the Customer’s Product Quality

This chapter addresses digitalization for quality management. The core concept is that supplier process data and quality information pertaining to a specific customer product can be made accessible to the customer, fostering more transparent collaboration between supplier and customer. This will subsequently pave new avenues for the supplier and customer to work together to enhance the quality of the customer product. This concept is being deliberated by DISA, which provides equipment and solutions to the foundry industry. For high-volume iron castings, it is typical for casting customers to incur quality-related costs of 2–4% of the purchase price. Additionally, quality costs of 2–5% emerge in the foundry itself. Thus, there is substantial potential for improvement. With systems in place for foundries that consolidate all quality-related data into a single database, it is now feasible to generate certificates that would accompany each casting delivery and which would provide the customer with the quality-related data for that batch. Another prospective option is granting the customer real-time access to quality-related data about their castings during production. Sharing data in this highly transparent manner will allow quality-related discussions to be grounded on solid data, making these discussions more concentrated and effective. However, despite this enhanced and more transparent collaboration between foundry and casting customer, the foundry would still undertake the primary effort to optimize casting quality internally. As this digital advancement would aid in improving casting quality and consequently reduce waste, it would have a direct and positive effect on the sustainability of casting production.