Our Sites

New metal fabricator takes collaboration to next level

How technology enables a new business model

Press brake bending with simulation

Metal Fab Solutions’ Diamond BH press brake comes with the Videre operator assistant that projects a simulation of the bend sequence onto the press brake ram.

Six years ago, Kurt Wollenberg wasn’t happy. He had founded a custom fabrication company and grew it to a $10 million-plus business. He liked the actual fabrication work, of course. He wouldn’t have launched the business if he didn’t. He thrived when faced with a complicated project. But he didn’t like the regulatory and personnel headaches of running a 75-person organization.

Intending to leave those headaches behind, Wollenberg sold his fabrication business six years ago. But he still wasn’t happy. He liked the projects and, especially, the people. He had spent his entire adult life in the business and had so many friends who also happened to be co-workers and customers.

So three years ago he got back into the fabrication game by launching Kaukauna, Wis.-based Metal Fab Solutions (MFS), but not as a typical startup, with one or a few people working nonstop out of a garage. MFS is a member of a unique organization called The Village Companies. Like any village, its population shares certain resources to be more competitive.

As Wollenberg put it, “We’re better together.”

Challenges of Being Medium-Sized

When a fabrication shop launches with a few welding machines, brakes, and a cutting table, operations are pretty straightforward. A few people can carry projects through from beginning to end. But as the shop grows, things change, as they did for Wollenberg’s previous fabrication company.

As the number of jobs grows, a shop needs an engineer or CAD technician to work with customer drawings. Quality assurance duties ramp up as customers require production part approval processes (PPAPs) and ISO certification. As the number of employees grows, the business needs a human resources manager. And to ensure a safe environment and abide by OSHA, the business needs someone to manage safety—perhaps not a full-time environmental, health, and safety manager, but at least someone to manage EH&S functions when needed.

Wollenberg found that as his previous company reached about 70 employees and neared $10 million in revenue, he and his team discovered they needed many functions of a larger business, but not all the time. Engineering was a prime example. Demand for engineering work ebbed and flowed with the product mix. Engineering jobs filled inboxes all at once, delaying order release and ship dates. But then jobs came in that didn’t require much engineering work, especially if the 3D CAD files were clean.

This made it difficult to justify hiring more than one engineer. Two would be moderately to very busy some of the time, other times just very bored.

The same challenges applied to human resources, information technology, and quality assurance. A medium-sized fabricator’s QA manager might be swamped preparing the paperwork for a PPAP one day, then have a very light work load the next, inspecting pieces as needed on a laser scanner and coordinate measuring machine.

As Wollenberg has found over the past three years, an entrepreneur can take alternative paths to launch a fabrication business—and The Village Companies, or “the village,” as the member companies call it, happened to open one of those paths.

Kurt Wollenberg and Tad Kallas of Metal Fab Solutions

MFS General Manager Kurt Wollenberg (left) and Fabrication Shop Manager Tad Kallas (right) have known each other for more than 20 years.

It Takes a Village

Although it didn’t have a name and was only a way of doing things, the village was born 40 years ago when the Treankler family began Bay Tek Games (now Bay Tek Entertainment) and MCL Industries in their home. MCL is an electrical enclosure and contract manufacturer in Pulaski, Wis., that sourced its fabrication work to, among other fabrication shops, the one Wollenberg used to run. Bay Tek Entertainment, also in Pulaski, is an inventor and maker of amusement games—products that require sheet metal enclosures.

As member companies grew through the addition of other businesses, Larry Treankler, chairman of The Village Companies, along with his partners Carl Treankler and Terry Hanstedt, wanted to ensure that the way of doing business that they had in the beginning was preserved—so they formalized the concept and put in print (and online, at thevillage.bz) the village’s reason for being:

  • To work with people we love and care about.

  • To create opportunities for those people.

  • To make a difference in the lives of our customers and suppliers.

  • To run successful businesses so we can give back to the communities we live and work in.

MFS entered the village about four years ago. “The idea came about from a weekend snowmobiling with the partners in the village at that time who were past customers of mine,” Wollenberg said. “They were telling me how they always wanted to get into metal, but it was not their area of expertise.” The idea took root. MFS was born and joined the village.

The Village Companies is a unique entity. It’s not a parent or holding company, and MFS and the other companies (which now total 14) aren’t subsidiaries. Because The Village Companies members aren’t under one corporate umbrella, each company remains independent and has its own profit and loss statement.

As Paul Knoll, president of MCL, explained, “Each [member company] is expected to give more than it takes from the village through the sharing of resources, relationships, ideas, and dreams. Often, as a village company is getting started, it will benefit from the resources the larger companies can provide, and then give back in other ways.”

MFS launched with just five employees, but being part of the village, it could act much bigger. If a job required a little engineering, MFS could send it to one of MCL’s engineers. The work didn’t come free; engineers divide their time among various companies, each paying their fair share.

Laser cutting at Metal Fab Solutions

MFS’s Mitsubishi laser cutting system has automated material loading and unloading. As the shop grows, MFS will add a material handling tower to the existing system.

“If I’m a five-person company, hiring a $100,000 engineer just isn’t practical,” Wollenberg said. “But if I use 10 percent of that person’s time, I pay 10 percent of the engineer’s salary, or $10,000. That’s affordable, even for a five-person shop.” MFS also gained access to (and shares the cost of) MCL’s quality engineers and EH&S and HR professionals.

Being independent, MFS isn’t a captive fabricator to MCL, Bay Tek, or other companies in the village. Only half of MFS’s work comes from supplying fabrications internally to other village companies. The other half comes from companies outside the village.

The sharing of certain resources gets around the problem of variable demand. Indirect labor becomes a variable cost. When a spate of work arrives requiring some engineering, MFS can turn to an engineer in the village. Same goes for PPAPs. If a job requires ISO certification, the customer can work with MCL Industries, which is ISO-certified; MCL then can subcontract the work to MFS, which follows MCL’s established ISO procedures.

How Technology Enables a Business Model

The relationships among village companies are closer than a typical farming-out scenario, and collaboration abounds in various facets of the business. Village company members meet periodically at what they call “joint leadership meetings” to discuss business challenges and opportunities. Quite often someone knows someone who knows someone who could solve a problem or lead to new opportunities. For instance, if MCL has an issue with a sheet metal enclosure, then a sheet metal expert at MFS can help.

That sheet metal expert is often Tad Kallas. MFS’s fabrication shop manager, Kallas has been in sheet metal long enough to know that the village concept might not have worked 25 years ago, when he and Wollenberg first met. Back then Kallas worked at a sheet metal firm close to Wollenberg’s previous fab shop, and he was all too familiar with the engineering challenges—particularly when it came to forming. He’d receive a print and discover a hole too close to the bend line, or find that the bend allowance and bend deductions didn’t account for the actual die widths he would be using to air-bend the part. So the print would go back to engineering. “This would happen seven times out of 10,” Kallas recalled.

If this happened today, the village concept really wouldn’t work as well as it does. If Kallas continually sent jobs back to engineering, sharing an engineer’s time with other companies wouldn’t be practical.

But today MFS needs relatively little of an engineer’s time. Sure, the occasional fabrication project does require a little engineering. But for the most part, MFS simply requests a solid model alongside PDFs of the drawings that serve as the baseline for inspection.

The process occurs very differently today, thanks largely to offline bend programming and simulation. Modern software—in MFS’s case, DiamondBend from MC Machinery Systems—ensures bending happens correctly the first time. When Kallas receives a solid model, he uses the DiamondBend software integrated into the shop’s design software (MFS uses SolidWorks, but DiamondBend can be integrated into Inventor and SpaceClaim as well).

“The software immediately tells me if it can or cannot be bent, writes the program based on the tools we’ll use, and calculates the flat,” Kallas said, adding that the flat dimensions are sent to the laser nesting software. “It’s like fabricating in reverse.”

When the cut parts arrive at the press brake, the operator retrieves them, calls up the program, then turns away from the control screen and looks right at the press brake ram, where a simulation of the bend sequence appears. Integrated with MFS’s Mitsubishi Diamond BH press brake, the Videre operator assistant projects a 3D bend simulation directly onto the face of the ram, guiding the operator through the sequence step by step.

Weld programming at Metal Fab Solutions

A robot programmer at MFS's welding division sets up a robotic welding operation.

For this to work smoothly, MFS does require the solid model, and customers don’t always supply one at first. Some hesitate for revision control reasons. “But then I tell customers about our process and its benefits, and I emphasize that we always inspect to the PDF drawings they give us,” Kallas said. “Then, almost always, they’re happy to send over the solid-model file.”

Let the Village Grow

Today MFS employs 30 people, 24 of whom work in the welding shop where the fabricator employs both manual and robotic welding.

MFS also supplies customers on a replenishment kanban program, a concept Wollenberg promotes with as many clients as he can. “A customer might want, say, 50 of one product just to meet minimum quantities for an outside powder coater. But then I ask them, ‘How many do you really need? If you only need 25, then we can run 50 and hold 25 in our building.’ They’ve just reduced their required footprint for the job and increased their inventory turns.” The arrangement gives MFS scheduling flexibility and better material yields, allowing Kallas to nest filler parts for these kanban replenishment orders alongside on-demand work.

Only three full-time work in the sheet metal shop, where they use one 6-kW Mitsubishi laser with automated loading/unloading, one press brake, a hardware insertion press, and a few other pieces of equipment. Those three employees churn out 15,000 to 20,000 pounds of work a day, enough to fill a 24-pallet truck that heads to the MFS welding facility in Green Bay.

“Those five workers feed enough work to keep 24 welders very busy,” said Kallas, adding that much of the forming work is quite complicated, including a fair number of construction equipment buckets that require consistent bump (incremental) bending. But thanks to modern equipment, the work flows quickly. Some low-volume or prototype orders can be programmed, cut, and formed in less than an hour.

Within three years Wollenberg and his partners plan to move the entire business under one roof, but the location won’t be just anywhere. He and most other members of The Village Companies plan to be on one campus. Wollenberg envisions one day driving customers and prospects around the campus, describing the concept and showing how—with the help of modern sheet metal fabrication technology, complemented by a new business model—so few can be so productive.

As the village member companies collaborate more, they can offer customers more services. And the more services they provide, the more turnkey packages they can offer, which in turn helps with customer retention. A fabricator that cuts and forms blanks can be easily replaced; a fabricator that works closely with a larger organization—one that provides services through a larger contract manufacturer and a variety of other companies—can’t be replaced so easily.

Most important, the business model allows MFS to provide a variety of services while remaining focused on its core competency. “The village allows us all to focus on what we do best, and for us that’s sheet metal and welding,” Wollenberg said. “That’s what really makes it so fun. And an important part of our business model is fun. We all need jobs, and we need to get the work done, but let’s have fun while we’re at it.”

About the Author
The Fabricator

Tim Heston

Senior Editor

2135 Point Blvd

Elgin, IL 60123

815-381-1314

Tim Heston, The Fabricator's senior editor, has covered the metal fabrication industry since 1998, starting his career at the American Welding Society's Welding Journal. Since then he has covered the full range of metal fabrication processes, from stamping, bending, and cutting to grinding and polishing. He joined The Fabricator's staff in October 2007.