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Stop to notice the technology

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

That lovely thought was from the great philosopher of the 1980s known as Ferris Bueller. What he lacked in formal followers, he more than made up for with style and outstanding karaoke skills. There is a reason his missives are still referenced more than 30 years later.

He was most definitely correct about the need to take notice. In today’s fast-paced world, where having an iPhone 4 is looked upon as having one of the giant portable bag phones from the latter part of the 20th century, you need to keep your head up to see what has passed and what is about to pass you by.

When you read “Laser cutting in a new light” on p. 90, you’ll learn why the maturation of LED lighting forced the TAMCO Group, Port St. Lucie, Fla., to invest in a fiber laser cutting machine. The company had watched LED technology emerge and falter because of unreliability, but when LED bulb manufacturers finally had perfected the energy-saving light source, the market took off. Old-school lighting products had to be redesigned—and are still being reworked—to accommodate LED technology. Suddenly those lighting manufacturers that were stuck with punching machines with hard tooling couldn’t respond as fast as competitors that had invested in laser cutting machines. In fact, TAMCO reports that it measures product life spans in months nowadays instead of years.

Want another example? Consider the future of the automobile. During a presentation at The FABRICATOR’s Leadership Summit in San Diego, Feb. 24-26, Csaba Csere, former editor of Car and Driver magazine, painted a future where cars won’t be needing human intervention to drive.

“I can see a day where driving a car is a leisure activity, like riding a bike or a horse,” he said.

This day is coming sooner rather than later, according to Csere. Google has announced that its self-driving car program should be ready for a limited rollout by 2020. Other industry experts, however, suggest that Level 4 autonomy, in which the vehicle handles all aspects of the driving experience, will occur between 2025 and 2030.

This sounds great for those commuters that might want to read or sleep on the way to work, but the impact may prove much greater. Imagine driverless taxis and limousines. Think about the long-haul trucking industry that would no longer have to worry about drivers pulling over for the required number of hours to rest.

You might argue that such examples relate only to those OEMs that directly serve the lighting and automotive industry, but for job shops, isn’t any industry segment a potential customer? Maybe technological leaps as described previously are warnings not to be a part of fast-changing industries in which supply-chain relationships are not highly valued.

The key is that metal fabricators can make informed decisions by paying close attention to technological change. Where one fabricator sees an opportunity, another fabricator senses increased risk.

To some degree, fabricators have an intimate knowledge of what technological leaps look like. They need only look at their own shop floors.

The rate at which fiber laser cutting machines have overtaken traditional CO2 laser machines is mind-blowing. Keeping in mind how fast fiber lasers operate, watching a 10-year-old laser cut sheet metal is like watching paint dry.

It’s not unusual to see robotic welding cells even in small shops. Robot prices have decreased over the years—just check eBay for used robots if you have the time—and they are easier to program when compared to previous generations.

I believe in the near future you’ll see a robot in front of a press brake dropping parts on a pallet that rests atop an automated guided vehicle that, when the order is completely loaded, will embark automatically to an assembly area. Non-value-added activity related to material handling increasingly will become a thing of the past.

It doesn’t take a fictional philosopher to know that such a future is a good thing for fabricators and their customers.

About the Author
The Fabricator

Dan Davis

Editor-in-Chief

2135 Point Blvd.

Elgin, IL 60123

815-227-8281

Dan Davis is editor-in-chief of The Fabricator, the industry's most widely circulated metal fabricating magazine, and its sister publications, The Tube & Pipe Journal and The Welder. He has been with the publications since April 2002.