Mould and Die in the Manufacturing sector

Moulds and Dies are integrated by a kind of tacit-knowledge based engineering, and they are of a critical capital good to determine the quality and price of products for end use. Dies and moulds are a critical capital good, but the accumulation of experiences is necessary for a country hopeful to newly develop its industrial sector to acquire manufacturing technology of moulds, and the build-up of such expertise on dies and moulds has necessitated the bringing up of skilled technicians, which takes time and is not so easy.

Dies and moulds are a cluster of product manufacturing knows how, and at the same time are essential elements in the mass-production process, but as far as an operator of the mass-production process remains dependent on dies and moulds supplied by vendors, the operator is not able to produce by himself the product that he wants to manufacture. As a result, demand for dies and moulds production emerges independently and thus the operator or his local vendor acquires machine tools as the process equipment for building moulds.

The manufacture of moulds requires capital goods (machine tools as process machinery) and such production goods as raw materials for moulds as well as parts and components of these dies and moulds. Moreover, in order to build these moulds, besides sophisticated process systems, master engineers and skilled technicians specializing in mould manufacture are also required. But, in recent years, machine tools have attained, through technological advancement, a high level of accuracy that only skilled technicians could realize in the past. Also, through the progress of computer software technology, preparation of drawings for dies and moulds has become much easier than in the past. Besides these developments, the remote control technology regulating machine tools has advanced substantially recently, so that it becomes possible to transmit the information of mould drawings as digital information, and control operation of machine tools from a remote place. In other words, if drawings for a product are available, it becomes possible to prepare drawings of dies and moulds for a product at one place, and transmits digitalized information of these moulds to remotely control machine tools and manufactured anywhere in the world as far technology is concerned.