Mould data management in plastic injection mould industries

Abstract

In the current mould-making industries, the challenge is to shorten the mould lead-time while maintaining the desired quality. This is one of the main demands from customers so as to maintain a competitive edge over the competition. While mould industries are always improving on their systems to cater to the rapidly changing plastics industry, one of the common issues that are still plaguing them is the management of large quantities of data within a mould project. In the current practice of local mould-making industries, almost all the data for the mould design, manufacture and testing stage are often either confused or duplicated unnecessarily. As a result, it becomes less responsive when changes are required since manual decision-making and sorting of these data are required. With the increasing complexity of plastic part design, the corresponding mould design, manufacturing, and testing data also increase in both quantity and complexity. The usual method of managing these data would take up a substantial amount of time. This issue could be resolved by incorporating a data management system that specifically caters to mould-making industries into their practice. This paper presents a framework for how the data from the different stages of the mould project could be managed more efficiently through the use of templates. This framework is divided into modules to cater for the various stages of the mould project. A case study is presented to illustrate the proposed framework for mould data management.