Intro
17%
Records and traceability: what to log, what it tells you over time
The minimum die log per hit-block, what a year of those logs reveals that a single teardown cannot, and the standards (AIAG CQI-9, IATF 16949) that already require most of it.
A shop pulls a forge die at 42K hits with a scrap rate that climbed from 0.6% to 3.1% over the last three shifts. The die is sectioned, the heat-check pattern is photographed, the hardness traverse runs on a witness coupon. The teardown report concludes "premature wear, suspect lube performance." The lube vendor is changed. The next die runs to 48K with the same scrap-rate climb in the last two shifts. The lube was not the problem. A year of consistent logs would have shown the climb tracked the night shift, not the lube barrel. The shop has no logs, so it had nothing to compare against, so it spent three months and a vendor relationship learning what a logbook would have told it in an afternoon.
A teardown is a snapshot. A year of logs is a movie. The teardown answers what failed. The logs answer why this die, this shift, this month, on this press.