In 2010, the then Under Secretary of Defense, Dr. Ashton Carter, issued a “Memorandum for Acquisition Professionals” that outlined a revised DOD strategy to “Obtain Greater Efficiency and Productivity in Defense Spending”. The DOD “Better Buying Power” objective as stated by Dr. Carter, is to procure the goods and services needed by the country’s Warfighters within the constraints of Congressional Budget and the overwhelming need to upgrade and replace equipment currently in the field.
Under-Secretary Carter made it clear that although the goal of the initiative is for the DOD to purchase goods and services at lower cost it was not intended to be at the expense of Contractor profit. The now Secretary of Defense, Dr. Carter encourages contractors to eliminate inefficiencies so they may sell to the DOD at a reduced cost without sacrificing performance and still increase their profit.
Investment Castings because of their ability to reduce the part count of designed structures are an efficient way for Customer Engineers to achieve major economies in direct procurement costs, assembly costs, inventory costs and administrative costs. However, customers can often miss opportunities to realize these savings as the advantages of investment casting are sometimes poorly understood.
To support our customers in improving the affordability of their products O’Fallon Casting founded its “O’Fallon Casting University” to assist them to better understand opportunities for and design of manufacturable investment castings. The OFCU is a comprised of both O’Fallon Casting sponsored classes and customer services that include:
- IC-101 is a 3-hour class taught at customer locations on the fundamentals of Investment Casting Design.
- IC-201 is a 3-day class conducted at O’Fallon Casting on the basics of Investment Casting Manufacture.
- Concurrent Engineering is OFC’s interactive and collaborative design service to optimize customer casting designs.
- O’Fallon Casting Design Guide is a free downloadable guide on the OFC website containing the rules-of-thumb for investment casting design.
- O’Fallon Casting Blogs on the OFC website that provide insight into casting topics.
Since 2011 more than 900 Customer/Engineers have availed themselves of the IC-101 & IC-201 classes offered by the O’Fallon Casting University.
If you have any questions regarding the O’Fallon Casting University or should like to inquire about the offered classes and services, please contact your O’Fallon Casting Sales Engineer for more information.