The Investment Casting industry relies on consistency. Foundries create intricate products with exact dimensions, and the background operations must run with precision to ensure product quality. To keep the process running smoothly, foundries and their service partners perform regular system maintenance to keep assets in optimal condition, which includes a variety of inspections to confirm equipment health and performance. Often, those conducting the inspections rely on notes and memory to record maintenance actions, which leaves room for error and delays.

Nalco Water, an Ecolab company, serves a variety of Investment Casting customers through its Colloidal Technologies Group (CTG). Colloidal silica is a key element in the casting process, used as a standard binder across the industry. In addition to supplying colloidal silica solutions, the CTG team provides customers with technical support that includes routine service visits.

To streamline these visits, CTG leverages new tools within an innovative mobile app for Nalco Water field associates. The app contains multiple service checklists unique to the Investment Casting industry, each with a series of tasks categorized by asset. As an output, the app generates a detailed report that customers receive as documentation of each visit. The app centralizes records, automates the assignment of follow-up actions, and simplifies the training process for new associates to ensure consistency during their on-boarding. By utilizing the app during service visits, CTG has improved the ease, efficiency, and consistency of the service delivered to their customers.

Adam Bennett, senior marketing manager for CTG, sees a tremendous opportunity for the app’s service functionality to improve the quality of each customer visit. “The app simplifies the reporting process and improves accountability for follow-up actions. It records information in near real-time, which proves to be more comprehensive, granular, and effective than a written report delivered hours or days later.”

CTG is among the first Nalco Water divisions to deliver digitally enabled service visits via its mobile field app. Other divisions are queued to adopt a similar approach; the service tools within the app will be scaled to other industries in the future.

“The service checklists within the field app allow us to make every visit impactful,” reflects Bennett. “We’re experts in the entire Investment Casting process, not just the areas that we directly touch with our chemistry, and this approach allows us to enhance the reliability and transparency of our service to demonstrate the full value that we can deliver to our customers.”