Moulding is where a foundry’s rejects are made and where they are hardest to trace, because the defect shows up two stages later at knockout. By then the sand that caused it has been through the muller three more times. Munshi keeps the sand plant’s own readings alongside the reject the operator logged, on the same clock.
Your ERP logs the moulds: boxes made, patterns run.
It won’t tell you the return sand was still hot when it went back to the muller, or which pattern is quietly producing the blow holes.
Why the gap existsWhere the losses hide
None of these stop the line. They surface at knockout, by which point the conditions that caused them are gone.
Return sand going back hot changes moisture and compactability, and the mould that results is not the mould you set the parameters for. It is a reading at the sand plant hours before it is a blow hole at knockout.
Blow holes, inclusions and cuts cluster by pattern and by shift far more often than they spread evenly. Averaged across a month, that cluster disappears entirely.
Time lost between strip and re-set never appears as downtime, because the line was never technically stopped. It appears as fewer moulds than the shift should have made, with no reason attached.
The join
Same run, same clock, same asset — three streams that only mean something together.
Moulds produced, pattern run, sand consumed, and the rejects booked after knockout. Accurate, and silent on which condition produced them.
Return sand temperature and muller current sampled continuously through the shift; mix cycle time per batch; and the operator’s reject log with the defect tagged at the point it was found.
A reject rate you can read by pattern and by shift, with the sand-plant condition that ran alongside it already attached.
What Munshi surfaces
Teal is normal, maroon is flagged. Illustrative data.
The band is where the sand should return. The drift past it is the afternoon nobody logged, and the shift the blow holes came from.
Tagged by the operator at knockout. One pattern is carrying most of it.
The same mix should not need more current. When it does, something upstream changed.
When an outcome moves and a signal moves with it, Munshi shows both and says they moved together. It does not tell you one caused the other. The operator confirms the cause, and the confirmed cause is written back to that asset’s register — so the pattern is already named the next time it appears.
Related stages
Energy per tonne, holding time and chemistry rework, per heat.
Temperature drift, misruns and ladle delays.
Get started
See this on your own line.
Bring a month you already understand. The useful test is whether Munshi finds what you already know — and then what you didn’t.