The enormous potential of modern custom metal fabrication

When you think about where most of the laser cutting machines, punch presses, press brakes, hardware insertion presses, and other machines are used in the U.S., the operations themselves are anything but simple. Say hello to the custom fabricator—a mix of contract fabrication alongside the “long tail” of low-volume, purely job shop work.

Dig deep into some of the larger custom fabrication operations, even those that seemingly rely mainly on a steady stream of contract work from a few major customers, and you’ll probably see that their shop floors can encounter thousands of different part numbers over a given month or year.

A fabricator acts as a conduit for so many industries, each with different demands. It is in effect numerous companies in one. This creates a puzzle that for every company seems to go together in a different way.

The high-product-mix world has spurred manufacturing experts to think differently. Books are emerging on everything from new accounting methods to new ways to flow product through the office and the shop.

The more books I read and the more shops I visit, the more I think about what this business will look like a generation from now. Fabricators will likely still put their businesses together with the same pieces, but they might also go together in a very different way.

And it could start with data. Today’s youngest workers grew up with all the world’s information in their pocket, and they’ll expect that kind of information accessibility in the workplace too. They’ll expect a “digital thread” of part and job information, from CAD and CAM through cutting (no loss of part information through file exports, for instance), bending, welding, all the way through shipping. Machine monitoring, from laser beam-on time to bending cycles to arc-on-time tracking, will seem utterly natural.

Tomorrow’s engineers likely won’t need to endure much tedium, inserting a radius here or a notch there. Instead, that tedium probably will be handled automatically, perhaps immediately after a customer uploads a drawing and requests a quote through a fabricator’s website.

The software unfolds formed pieces, applies producible radii based on the company’s brake tooling library and available machinery, applies all the conventional fixes, and within minutes provides the customer with a quote. A generation from now, such engineering automation might become the norm, and engineers would then devote their time to the true design-for-manufacturability challenges.

Cross-trained sales and estimating teams might use this software as a tool, visiting customers with tablets or laptops in hand. Those teams might be dedicated to certain market segments, developed carefully by a fabricator’s top executives, who work as a kind of portfolio manager. Just as an investment guru tweaks an individual’s portfolio, top managers work with operations—not reactively (why is this job late!?) but proactively, building a diverse portfolio of customers that match the fabricator’s operational strengths.

Cross training and general knowledge sharing abound. Engineers work closely with the company’s highly skilled fabricators in an area dedicated to prototyping and low-volume, quick-turn work. Engineers know (and refer to best practices documents at their desk) the ideal bend radii for consistent bending with available shop tooling; the effects of shrinkage and distortion on various weldments; surface finish, paint prep, and powder coating basics; and best practices when it comes to weld fixture development, using both off-the-shelf and laser-cut components.

The cross pollination of knowledge helps an efficient team get better and better. They consult with sales and estimating too. The result: By the time work enters the shop, it’s finely tuned and prepped to flow as smoothly as possible.

Of course, feeding ideal jobs to the floor is just half the challenge. Next comes creating an environment where those jobs can flow smoothly. The fabricator might have a value stream dedicated to contract work and another value stream dedicated to the long tail of job shop work.

Work isn’t “pushed” to the floor; instead, downstream operations “pull” from upstream via capacity signals. Flow is visual. If work-in-process extends to a certain point on the floor (say, in an area marked with yellow or red tape or signs), workers know that something’s amiss, and they take corrective action.

They don’t focus on machine uptime; they instead focus on machine availability and job flow. If jobs are moving and machines are producing or available to produce, all is well. A machine that’s unexpectedly down or a job that takes longer than expected essentially steals available capacity—capacity that the shop now cannot sell. All is not well. Thankfully, most of the time all is well and capacity keeps growing, as does the fabricator’s market share and overall success.

The funny thing is that all this isn’t just the shop of the future; it’s really the shop of today. This entire narrative is built from different puzzle pieces uncovered over years of shop visits and book reading. If I had to recommend a few, I’d suggest The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt; It’s About Time: The Competitive Advantage of Quick Response Manufacturing by Rajan Suri; and The Monetary Value of Time by Joyce Warnacut.

Another one is Suri’s The Practitioner’s Guide to POLCA: The Production Control System for High-Mix, Low-Volume, and Custom Products, which proposes an innovative way job shops can provide “capacity signals” on the floor, so no one works on jobs that downstream processes can’t handle, a topic The FABRICATOR will be covering in-depth next month.

Sure, custom metal fabrication can be a world of never-ending headaches. But built right, with customer and market diversification and low revenue concentration, it also can be a business full of opportunity, making it an often-overlooked gem of modern manufacturing.