How a fab shop can develop a sheet metal bending champion

With all the different personalities that contribute to a successful metal fabrication business, how do they go about converting a complex manufacturing process like bending sheet metal into a seamless work flow? To achieve this, shops must take a critical and challenging step: Develop a technical press brake champion. Getty Images

The question is simple enough: How do we achieve bending consistency across the workforce? With all the different personalities that contribute to a successful business, how do we go about converting a complex manufacturing process into a seamless work flow? To achieve this, in my opinion, you must take a critical and challenging step: You must develop a technical champion.

What Is a Technical Champion?

Technical champions can build your team’s technical knowledge base and guide them through uncertainty. These “technical owners” set guidelines for your team to follow and bring clarity to the specific challenges that exist in your manufacturing process. They actively seek knowledge and bring new tools and technology into your organization in a way that smooths out yesterday’s speed bumps.

In the absence of a champion, teams can resort to chaos. For bending specifically, your premanufacturing team, such as engineers and estimators, will likely seek technical guidance from inconsistent sources—if they bother asking for guidance at all. It’s even worse on the shop floor. Without a clearly identified technical owner, machine operators are left to make critical decisions without a defined path to expert guidance, which can lead to poor throughput, scrapped parts, and damaged equipment.

On a more somber note, poor bending decisions can lead to severe personal injuries on the shop floor, and in this context the brake press is disconcertingly similar to an appendage-removing guillotine. It may seem like embellishment, but I’ll challenge you to ask around a bit and see if your team members have any press brake horror stories. I’ll bet they do, and I’ll bet they’re scary enough to make you flinch.

Why Do You Need a Champion?

Bending challenges are presented to us in all shapes and sizes, and they are entirely relative to your shop’s DNA. Bending success is dictated by how your team prepares before parts are delivered to the brake press. Anything out of the ordinary for your team is something that needs to be assessed. If they have the right tools and training, preproduction teams should be able to identify and assess various application-dependent issues, including:

• Complex flange profiles (especially double-up or double-down flanges).
• Short flanges.
• Tapered flanges.
• Holes, features, and hardware close to bend lines.
• Uncommon bend radii.
• Uncommon materials/alloy/finishes.
• Offset bends.
• Small parts (finger pinchers).
• Large or awkward parts (safety/fatigue risk).
• Bend lengths versus tooling availability.
• Unusual dimensional tolerances.
• Internal bends.
• Acute bends.

Each of these issues has the potential to stop your production team dead in its tracks if the solution isn’t put in place before the parts arrive at your brake press. For instance, say a part designed with a 0.125-in. bend deduction arrives at your machine. The part has a short flange that cannot be formed on the intended tooling. Your operator jumps to problem-solving mode, chooses a V die 0.5 in. smaller, and is able to form the short flange. However, this smaller V forces a much smaller inside bend radius. Instead of the 0.125-in. bend deduction that your engineering team applied, the part should have used a 0.06-in. bend deduction.

Your part now is out of tolerance, and your team must spend time deciding how best to proceed. Maybe you send the parts and hope for the best. Maybe you call the customer and ask for a deviation. Perhaps you scrap the parts and start over. Regardless, you have just been forced to deal with an irritating distraction—one that has cost you valuable production time. This has happened to all of us, and it is easily avoidable.

At my shop, we use several tools to help our production and preproduction teams vet bending challenges. We use both offline programming software and a separate bending collaboration software to identify possible risk factors. These tools are invaluable for us and have significantly reduced our accidental misses, but they all still lack in certain scenarios.

The most challenging problems always will require an assessment from our bending champion. In our bending department, for instance, the champion has the authority to override certain rules in certain situations, as long as doing so does not sacrifice quality or safety. This arrangement is especially helpful when a creative solution is needed for a profitable venture.

Most important, when your bending champion has an opportunity to buy in to a high-level bending challenge before the parts are released to the shop floor, you now have a dedicated person who will go to great lengths to ensure that the solution is implemented to plan and that your parts get to your customer safely, correctly, and on time. You have someone who is finally willing to take accountability for the success of your department, rather than a group of people all confident that the issue belongs to someone else.

Who Should Be Your Champion?

OK, so enough about why you need a champion. Now, how do you go about it? First, identify your candidates. This is definitely a challenge. I like to look for existing employees who have more brain power than their current role requires. If you have someone who’s getting bored, that’s a good first step. You want someone who has demonstrated the ability to process technical information and explain complex ideas in an understandable way. Curiosity is one of the most important personality traits for your champion. It’s an unfortunately rare trait—and one that should be celebrated.

A shrewd business-minded manager will be tempted to justify the labor cost of a champion by bogging them down with traditional leadership responsibilities. If you have a real champion who also is great at being a lead person or supervisor, you have a proverbial unicorn.

A good champion candidate will be someone who doesn’t have an official leadership position, but whose demeanor and ability to learn and demonstrate technical competence earn them a place of notable respect amongst their peers. Look for a person who already carries the personality trait of perceived wisdom. This is probably not the person you want wasting their time resolving petty day-to-day personnel conflicts or worrying about who is supposed to be emptying trash cans.

In my production environment, team leaders are responsible for day-to-day activities such as scheduling, 5S, team development, disciplinary and attendance issues, and a host of other necessary distractions. Nearly never-ending, these responsibilities keep an engaged supervisor running ragged all day long. Their work load does not leave much time for the researching, networking, and experimentation that a true technical champion will need to be successful.

Your team leader is responsible for making the final decision and accepting responsibility for results. Your champion is responsible for supporting and guiding your team leaders to make informed technical decisions that mitigate the impact of bending mistakes.

How Do You Develop a Champion?

Your champion needs time and permission to reach far beyond the boundaries of your facility. Online research will definitely create opportunities for learning, but there is a maze of misinformation and outdated philosophies to navigate.

Instead, send your champion out into the world. You will need to spend some money, and you need to be happy to do it. Send them to tradeshows like FABTECH. Send them to visit press brake OEM showrooms. Encourage them to build relationships with industry experts like Steve Benson and a host of others who are excited to share knowledge with the next generation.

Give your champion the freedom and funds to build and buy tools for your team. New press brakes are shiny and wonderful machines, but they will not fix a broken system. You may be able to achieve far more impactful results simply by implementing some training and a few tools that alleviate longstanding blind spots.

Bending collaboration software will give your team a common analysis process and a common language for assessing problems before parts arrive on the shop floor. Offline programming software can be used to develop flats, choose tooling, and develop bend sequences, even if you don’t have machines that are compatible with the software. Just the process of proving out your parts offline can drastically improve your first-part success rate, even if operators only ever receive a paper print.

Your champion will require the direct support of your production authority. Help your champion tease out the weak spots in your system. Depending on your shop’s DNA, these weak spots can hide in plain sight for years simply because no one questions them. Do your operators choose tooling instead of your design engineers? Are your estimators kept current on challenging bending applications? What about the challenges you’ve overcome that now are core competencies? How long has it been since you assessed the condition of your consumable press brake tooling? This list could stretch on for pages, and if you don’t have someone responsible for these things, they are likely being neglected.

Technical champions, of course, play a critical role in driving improvements on the shop floor. Still, they need real influence to make a difference. You will have to help all of the related departments understand why they should value and support this new champion. Show your teams that your champion has your full support to veto an unsafe bending application, and that the only path of appeal is through a significant authority figure.

You Have a Champion—Now What?

Your new champion may not yet have the ability to skillfully navigate tense situations and may become frustrated at the lack of interest or response received from busy teammates. It’s your job to listen to the guidance your champion gives and to find a path to implement mutually beneficial improvements across all related production departments.

As an example, let’s say your champion has identified value in presenting a monthly bending status update for your preproduction teams. This should allow estimators and engineers to review a few high-level bending successes and failures from the past few weeks. You see the value of this, so you approve the suggestion.

Your champion collects the data and presents it clearly, perhaps even draws some conclusions and makes a few suggestions for improvement. But it’s your job to make sure that the preproduction team cares enough to show up, pay attention, and actively engage in the meeting and continual improvement opportunities.

Champions must integrate the needs of the bending department with the needs of the company. To achieve this, they can’t spend every waking hour on the shop floor. To this end, champions need to be present in meetings where company challenges are being discussed. They also need to be kept up to date on new accounts and potential jobs under consideration, even if the work never materializes. By participating in these meetings, champions begin to get a feel for the type of responsiveness and customer service that’s required to keep your customers, and your business, healthy and happy.

An Anchor for Company Success

The process to build a champion takes vision, time, patience, encouragement, and the willingness to spend a little money without an instant ROI. The technical champion is by no means a silver bullet that can solve all manufacturing challenges, but they still can be a critical piece of the puzzle.

A champion unsupported will wither like anyone else. But when your champion gets fully activated, you will likely have a significant contributor who provides trusted guidance and anchors the core competencies that make your company successful.