Risk management related to mold manufacturing schedules in the manufacturing industry, the foundation of modern industry is a subject of ongoing research. The mold manufacturing industry is facing a rapidly shifting manufacturing workforce, driven by intense price competition and an aging workforce. Furthermore, the industry is rapidly shifting from a focus on domestic production to a focus on global component manufacturing. This highlights the importance of an appropriate production schedule management system. For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), delays in mold manufacturing delivery can make it difficult to secure future orders. Therefore, managing delivery delays can be crucial to a company's survival. Therefore, managing mold design delays is crucial to preventing delivery delays. Therefore, research on mold design process delays appropriate for SMEs is necessary. This study utilizes Random Forest Regression as predictive methods for mold design process delay time.

Plastic injection molding is widely used in the automotive, electronics, and other manufacturing industries. Since product quality is significantly affected by process variables such as temperature, pressure, speed, and cycle time, datadriven quality management has become increasingly important. However, conventional quality control methods mainly depend on operator experience and post-process inspection, making it difficult to detect defects and abnormal process conditions in real time. In addition, manufacturing datasets often suffer from severe class imbalance because defective samples are much fewer than normal samples. This study proposes an AI-based defect prediction and anomaly detection system using plastic injection molding process data. For defect prediction, XGBoost was selected as the supervised learning model, and SMOTE was applied to address class imbalance. Recall, F1-score, and PR-AUC were used as the main evaluation metrics instead of accuracy. SHAP analysis was also applied to identify important process variables affecting defect occurrence. For anomaly detection, Isolation Forest and AutoEncoder were used together. Isolation Forest was adopted for fast first-stage detection, while AutoEncoder was used to detect complex nonlinear abnormal patterns. The results indicate that the proposed system can support both defect prediction and process anomaly detection. In the supervised learning results, XGBoost showed the best performance on the CN7 dataset, achieving a recall of 1.000 and an F1-score of 0.800. However, all supervised models showed limited defect detection performance on the RG3 dataset, indicating the effect of severe class imbalance and dataset-specific characteristics. In anomaly detection, AutoEncoder achieved the highest F1-score among the compared models, while Isolation Forest demonstrated practical advantages for real-time application due to its computational efficiency. Therefore, the proposed AI-based system can contribute to smart quality management and data-driven decision-making in plastic injection molding processes.