A strategy for cast part design process optimisation: Customer inquiry specification phase

In the increasing competition from Newly Industrialised Countries in Asia like China, the Finnish foundries are faced to change their service concept to more customer service oriented and integrated to the design process of casted parts to avoid to compete in low cost cast segment. The paper presents a framework and concept for foundry industry to create enabling technology to create a service concept for design services, where a foundry can create a full service for casted parts design and production. The key element is a new customer interface, where the customer communicates with the foundry by a process, which is created by the foundry or foundry near engineering service company. The communication is standardised with Entity-Relationship modelling, describing a SQL-database, XML-based inquiry data document and generic URL-linked CAD-files based on surface modelling.