Four cavities are blocked. Your price list still assumes eight.
Standard ERP treats every factory as a generic assembly plant: one operation, one duration, one cost per hour. A moulding plant is not that. Your output is a function of cavity count and cycle time, your maintenance is measured in shots rather than dates, and your recipes are percentages. Below is what that difference costs when the system does not know about it.
Recognise any of this
Where the money goes before anyone calls it a problem
If more than two of these are true this week, the cost is already larger than the system you would replace.
- 01
The mould has run at four of its eight cavities since March. The routing still says eight.
Output per hour halves, the duration on every order doubles, and the machine cost per part doubles with it. Meanwhile the quotation, the schedule and the margin report all still use the design specification. The loss is real, continuous, and nowhere on a report.
- 02
Preventive maintenance is due every 50,000 shots and you find out you passed it when the parts start failing.
A mould has an expected life measured in shots, not months. Miss the service interval and you are not scheduling maintenance, you are scheduling a repair — and a repair is downtime on the machine as well as cost on the tool.
- 03
The recipe says 70% virgin, 28% regrind, 2% masterbatch. Nobody stops the operator who runs it at 45% regrind on a food-grade part.
Regrind is free material until the day it is a customer complaint, a failed batch or a lost food-safety approval. The ceiling has to be a hard block in the system, not a note on the wall.
- 04
The auditor asks which resin lot went into the scrap that became the regrind that went into this part.
Under BRC or ISO 22000 that chain has to be answerable. Reconstructing it from production sheets takes a week of someone's life, every audit, and the answer is only as good as the handwriting.
- 05
Changeovers are scheduled by whoever is on the phone. Black runs before white.
Purge material and purge time are a straight cost, and they are entirely a function of the order the day was run in. Sequencing dark to light and grouping by material is free money that nobody collects because nobody sees the sequence as a decision.
- 06
The customer's mould is in your factory and the only record of it is that everyone knows where it is.
Customer-owned tooling is custody, and often an amortisation agreement — the first two million pieces at one price, the balance at another. Neither the custody nor the price break survives a change of staff.
- 07
You cannot answer whether last year's biggest order actually made money.
It is the one number every moulder wants and almost none have, because it needs cavity-aware machine cost, real scrap, real regrind value and real changeover time — four things that live outside the system in most plants.
What we build
The system that removes those, specifically
Not a feature list. Each of these exists because one of the problems above cost somebody real money.
Cavity-aware capacity and cost
Each mould carries its cavity count and the status of every cavity. Output per hour is computed from the cavities actually running and the cycle time, so a blocked cavity changes the schedule and the unit cost the moment it is recorded — and a running total shows what the blockage has cost this month.
Maintenance measured in shots
Shot counters per mould, service intervals in shots, expected life in shots, and an alert before the interval rather than after it. Repair decisions get a payback figure: cost of the repair against the daily cost of running the tool damaged.
Percentage recipes that resolve to kilograms
You write the formulation the way the plant thinks about it — virgin, regrind, colorant, additive as percentages — and the system produces the bill of material in kilograms for the batch size being run. Regrind ceilings are enforced per product, and a food-grade part cannot be released above its limit.
Batch genealogy, both directions
Resin lot into the order, order into the scrap, scrap into the regrind lot, regrind lot into the next order. Forward from a resin lot to every part it touched, and backward from a complaint to every lot involved — in the time it takes to open a record, which is what an audit or a recall actually requires.
Changeover and colour sequencing
The day is sequenced by material and by colour, dark to light, with the startup scrap allowance — so many shots times the cavity count — costed into every changeover instead of quietly disappearing into yield.
Mould register with custody and amortisation
Every tool: who owns it, where it is, what it has run, what it is worth, and the price steps agreed with the customer. When ownership is the customer's, the record is the one you can show them.
Estimating a part that does not exist yet
Make-to-order moulders win work by pricing a part before the tool is cut. That estimate — resin, cycle, cavities, tooling amortisation, packing — is built in the system rather than in a spreadsheet on one person's laptop, and it becomes the baseline that the finished job is measured against.
Questions
What people in this industry ask us first
We already run Odoo MRP. Why is this different?
Odoo MRP is a good assembly engine and it does not know what a cavity is. It will happily tell you a mould running at half its cavities is on schedule and on cost, because nothing in a standard work centre models cavity count, shot life, regrind percentage or purge. What we add sits on top of the MRP you already have rather than replacing it.
Do we have to put every mould in on day one?
No. Start with the tools that carry your volume — usually a small number of moulds account for most of the machine hours. Those are also where a blocked cavity or a missed service costs the most, so the return shows up before the rest of the register is loaded.
We are BRC certified. Will this survive the audit?
That is one of the reasons it is built the way it is. Batch genealogy in both directions, regrind ceilings enforced rather than advised, and certificates of analysis held against the resin lot they belong to. The audit question stops being a research project and becomes a query.
How we deliver it
Plastics — injection and blow moulding
Start with a diagnosis, not a demo
Two weeks. We walk your floor and your books, and you get the list of where money is leaving the business with a cost against each item. The list is yours whether or not you work with us afterwards.
Monday to Friday, 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM (GST)
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