Kokomo Casting Plant becomes safer & efficient, hopes for silver rating this year

The FCA US Kokomo Casting Plant (KCP) has become safer, efficient and cleaner over the years, according to the plant manager Jerry Peterson. Last year, KCP made a new investment into furnaces for the process of re-melting aluminium in-house in order to improve its efficiency.

Peterson said, “We closed the books on 2016, and we re-melted roughly 113 million pounds of metal. By doing that, even though the plant doesn’t necessarily get the savings, our company does. We save about 11 cents a pound by melting it in-house as compared to sending it to an outside vendor. That’s roughly about 13 million pounds we’ve saved.”

In 2015, KCP made history by winning bronze rating for its efforts in implementing World Class Manufacturing (WCM). With this, KCP has become the first die casting plant to receive such an award. WCM is a methodology that aims at reducing waste while increasing productivity and improving quality and safety.

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In 2017, the company expects for silver rating and further progress. “We’re going for silver this year, like all the other plants, and I believe we’ll all get there. That’s the biggest challenge in front of us this year,” he concluded.

The company pours about 1 million pounds of aluminium in the plant every day or about three percent of the world’s supply in aluminium.