How manufacturing technology uproots tradition for some metal fab shops

The skilled labor shortage continues unabated in the pandemic recovery. Technological change continues unabated too. The two together uproot shop floor tradition. Getty Images

Greg Rush remembers several plant managers in the 1980s who gave “anger management” a new meaning. “Their mentality was, the madder they made you, the harder you would work. That experience gave me clarity on how not to lead.”

Today Rush is business development manager at Ohio-based fabricator Rexarc International. He arrived at Rexarc in 2011 as an operations manager, took Dale Carnegie coaching courses, and has become virtually the mirror opposite of the managers he experienced as a young fab shop employee.

“I learned early on that you have to empower people,” he said. “You give people the tools so they can make decisions, and you support those decisions. You look for patterns, of course, and make sure you have the right person in the right seat. But if you give people the right tools [to make their own decisions], you’ve got to trust them.”

Trust is in short supply as the pandemic labor shortage continues unabated, making the skills crisis fabricators have faced for decades even worse. Poaching is on the rise. “We’re all stealing from each other, unfortunately,” said Steve Tokarz, president of IMS Companies, a large fabricator based in Des Plaines, Ill.

Fabricators often poach because hiring the inexperienced has too many unknowns. Will they engage? Will they care? Will they show up? Can they read a tape measure? Every generation tells the “these kids today” stories, but somehow, no matter how lazy or inept “these kids” are, society muddles through to the next generation.

Still, the “these kids” stores today seem particularly painful. And sure, schooling and societal problems probably play a role. But so, too, does technology and the speed of change it brings. Consider just how productive modern high-powered fiber lasers really are. How about press brakes with automatic tool change and offline programming? How about laser welding?

Years ago, preglobalization, a fab shop might have served the same customers for years, performing the same processes the same way. Top-down, my-way-or-the-highway, tough-it-out management styles could work in these environments. Sure, a shop might have a lot of turnover, but some would stay the course or even thrive and carry the company forward to the next generation.

The whole organization was rooted in tradition. Those who stayed the course learned that tradition—the manual layout, the math, the tricks mentors passed on to rookies. They could visualize how formed parts unfolded and could weld and cut dang near anything. Experience—gained month by month, year by year, filled with plenty of in-the-trenches stories—was everyone’s best teacher. And their bosses were tough, but by God they worked hard, they learned, and eventually thrived.

Such shop environments promoted tradition and the passing on of tribal knowledge. Problem is, tribal knowledge doesn’t deal well with technological change, and over the past 20 years metal fabrication has seen plenty. New kinds of machines don’t just change the job of an operator, they can change how an entire fabricating company is run. When a panel bender or automatic-tool-change brake makes job changeover time next to nothing, fabricators think differently about batch sizes and part flow. When a shop adds laser welding, it needs to think differently about fit-up (more stringent but doable thanks to precision cutting and bending) and finishing requirements (virtually nonexistent). Add a wave of baby boomer retirements into the mix, and you might uproot those fab shop traditions entirely.

Rush and his team at Rexarc know about uprooting traditions. The fourth-generation family business will be a century old in 2024. With expanded cutting and rolling capabilities, the organization in some respects has experienced more change during the past two years than it has in decades.

When Rush arrived as operations manager in 2011, he experienced what many have in this business: the inertia of tradition. “When I arrived, I asked, ‘Why do you do it this way?’ And of course they’d tell me, ‘Well, this is the way we’ve always done it.’”

Still, he was careful to ask the question in a curious, nonjudgmental way. “I told people, ‘I’m not an expert in what you’re doing on the floor.’ One person had been here 30 years, and I was here six months. ‘I don’t know how to do this. I trust you. What are your thoughts on this? Let’s talk through it.’”

Over time his approach built trust, loosened the inertia of tradition, and eased the fear of making a mistake. As Rush put it, “Over time, people start to think, ‘This guy isn’t going to beat me up over a wrong decision, and he’s going to give me the tools to make the right decision.’”

Rush called this the “soft side” of a company. You could call it a fab shop’s personality, and the collaborative one Rush described might find more success in a world where technology—and shop traditions—can change so quickly.