I did some work in injection molding too. Our shops tenbded to be lower tonnage, making multi-cavity small items. Here are some things to bear in mind as you move forward.It sounds like your management may be trying to “end world hunger” with a single project. Break out your down time categories. There is down time for change-over, for preventative maintenance, and for breakdowns. You can be maintaining either the press or the mold, so you want the breakdowns to reflect that.Once you start assigning down time to the respective categories, you can build a Pareto chart to see where your effort is spent best.If you need to speed changeovers, Shingo’s work on “Single Minute Exchange of Die” could provide some good insights.If you want to reduce breakdowns, you probably will need still deeper breakdowns of repair cause categories. Eventually, you will get specific: X hours of preventive mainetnance on such-and-such category will return Y hours of additional up time. Then you can see whether prevnetive maintenance can be built into other times when a unit is down – for instance, maybe you can maintain a press while a mold is being changed out for repair, and so on.Until you know what the “as-is” condition looks like, however, it is inappropriate to establish a goal. Each category, and each kind of break down, has its own range of as-is and could-be performance.Hope this helps!
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