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A foundry is a factory that produces metal castings. Metals are cast into shapes by melting them into a liquid, pouring the metal into a mold, and removing the mold material after the metal has solidified as it cools. The most common metals processed are aluminium and cast iron. However, other metals, such as bronze, brass, steel, magnesium, and zinc, are also used to produce castings in foundries. In this process, parts of desired shapes and sizes can be formed.

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A machine shop is where machining, a form of subtractive manufacturing, is done. In a machine shop, machinists use machine tools and cutting tools to make parts, usually of metal or plastic (but sometimes of other materials such as glass or wood). 

 

The parts produced can be the end product of the factory, to be sold to customers in the machine industry, the car industry, the aircraft industry, or others. In other cases, companies in those fields have their own machine shops.

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The production can consist of cutting, shaping, drilling, finishing, and other processes. The machine tools typically include metal lathes, milling machines, machining centers, multitasking machines, drill presses, or grinding machines, many controlled with computer numerical control (CNC). Other processes, such as heat treating, electroplating, or painting of the parts before or after machining, are often done in a separate facility. A machine shop can contain some raw materials (such as bar stock for machining) and an inventory of finished parts. These items are often stored in a warehouse.

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A machine shop can be a capital intensive business, because the purchase of equipment can require large investments. A machine shop can also be labour-intensive, especially if it is specialized in repairing machinery on a job production basis, but production machining (both batch production and mass production) is much more automated than it was before the development of CNC, programmable logic control (PLC), microcomputers, and robotics. It no longer requires masses of workers, although the jobs that remain tend to require high talent and skill.

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Uttara ERP has been successfully implemented and used at some of the Foundry and Machine shop industries. Foundry & Machine shop specific modules and functionalities have all been incorporated into Uttara ERP.

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