A monthly people review for foundries and casting units: ten questions for the owner

Ask a foundry owner about last month and you will hear tonnage poured, melt loss, power units per tonne and the buyer who pays late. Ask who walked out of the fettling shed, which furnace hand sat through every night melt, or whether anyone logged the ladle that slipped off its trunnion, and the answers thin out. That side of the plant drifts unseen until a melter resigns or a crane signal is misread over the pit.

A fixed monthly review catches the drift. It runs under an hour, draws on registers already lying in the time office, and puts identical questions every month. Repetition is the point. One odd answer tells you little. An answer that recurs for a quarter tells you where to act.

1. Who left: from melting, moulding, core shop, knockout, fettling or inspection, after how long, and giving what reason?
2. Lone experts: which tasks, such as spectro correction, pit moulding or die setting, have a single signed-off name on some shift?
3. Scrap: of this month's rejected castings, how many carry a moulder's chalk mark, a stamped die number or a melt tag that ties them to a shift?
4. Nights: who sat through the most night melts, lining sinters and heat treatment loads, and are they last month's names again?
5. Overtime: hours per crew, paid on the promised day or not, and any grumbling from the pouring gang or trim press crew?
6. Burns and near misses: what was logged, where, and what changed at the ladle route, tapping spout or grinder afterwards?
7. Heat: during the hottest spell, were breaks kept, water close to the furnace platform and the pouring turn rotated?
8. Joiners: of last quarter's intake, who remains, and what came up in their day-six and thirty-day talks?
9. Pairings: which learner climbed a level, which pairing has stalled, and has each teaching allowance reached the payslip?
10. Next month: who wants leave for a festival or harvest, which heavy pours or die launches are booked, and can the roster carry both?

• Muster roll plus exit notes, each leaver's section and months served written alongside.
• Skill grid, lone-name cells circled in red.
• Rejection register, sorted by defect type, then by moulder, die or pourer, then by shift.
• Melt and heat treatment rosters, with nights counted per head.
• Overtime sheet and wage dates from accounts.
• Burns and near-miss book; a blank book counts as an answer.
• Joiner list with review notes, plus the current pairing list.
• Leave applications and the order book, side by side.

1. 1

   Fix a slot nobody can dodge

   First working Monday, once the morning pour is done. Owner, plant head, the personnel clerk, and one senior hand, from a different bay each month.

2. 2

   Circulate one sheet two days early

   The personnel clerk writes a single factual line against each question. Skip the graphs. People come to decide, not to read.

3. 3

   Begin with the previous actions

   Each owner of an action reports done, delayed or dropped. Delays get a fresh date. Anything dropped needs a reason said aloud.

4. 4

   Take the ten in order, briskly

   Roughly four minutes apiece. When an answer echoes last month's, pause and ask what keeps producing it. That echo is your finding.

5. 5

   Leave with three actions or fewer

   One person and one date per action. A dozen pledges made in a hurry tend to be a dozen pledges forgotten by the next heat.

Exits bunched in knockout and fettling usually trace to heat, silica dust and the low regard shown to grinders and shot blasters. Long-serving moulders leaving suggests pay or a supervisor instead. Scrap with no chalk mark or die code is first a tracing gap, and only later a question about any person. A burns book that stays empty for months seldom describes a safe floor. More often the crew suspects that writing something up will cost them.

Treat question four with care. If two furnace hands fill most nights month after month, they are holding the plant up, and they are your likeliest next resignations. Question ten exists for the old foundry trap: a big pump-casing order arriving in the same week that half the moulding bay boards trains home for Diwali or Pongal.

Skip two months and the habit is gone. Book all twelve dates in January. Leave the ten questions untouched for half a year so trends have room to appear. Each month, tell the shift meeting about one change the review produced, naming nobody. The crew then sees that exits, complaints and near misses actually travel somewhere.

Question two needs a current skill grid for foundry tasks. Question six goes faster when every burn is logged on one printable near-miss form. A shift-and-die reporting pack is described for gravity die casting reporting, and our HR reporting and analytics service builds packs of that kind. Recurring trade-wide problems are gathered on our foundry sector page.