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

This chapter deals with digitalization for quality management. The central idea is that supplier process data and quality information related to a specific customer product can be made available to the customer, supporting more transparent cooperation between supplier and customer. This will then, in turn, create new ways for the supplier and the customer to collaborate to improve the quality of the customer product. The idea is being discussed by DISA, which supplies equipment and solutions to the foundry industry. For high-volume iron castings, it is common for casting customers to have quality-related costs of 2–4% of the purchase price. In addition, quality costs of 2–5% arise in the foundry itself. So there is significant potential for improvement. With systems available for foundries that hold all quality-related data in a single database, it’s now possible to create certificates that would accompany each casting delivery and which would give the customer the quality-related data for that batch. Another future possibility is giving the customer real-time access to quality-related data about their castings while they are being produced. Sharing data in this very transparent way will let quality-related discussions be based on solid data, making those discussions more focused and effective. However, despite this closer and more transparent cooperation between foundry and casting customer, the foundry would still make the main effort to optimize casting quality internally. As this digital development would help increase casting quality and hence reduce scrap, it would have a direct and positive impact on the sustainability of casting production.