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A look back at FABTECH 2021: A turning point for automation?

FABTECH 2021 attendees

Attendees at the FABTECH 2021 expressed a new sense of urgency. Metal fabricators and manufacturers need capacity, and shops need it now. Advancing automation capabilities seems to be best step forward.

In previous years I’d be reporting on FABTECH just about now, in early November. This year, FABTECH held its spot in September, a time reserved for some of the largest, most impactful shows in Chicago’s McCormick Place. In 2021, North American metal fabricating’s main event happened to be one of the first shows held at the iconic convention center for more than 18 months. It felt good to be back.

“From a sales perspective, everything has been incredibly strong. We’re taking on business at the pace we can hire.” So said Warren Long, director of purchasing with Mayville, Wis.-based MEC, the custom and contract metal fabrication giant that has been No. 1 on The FABRICATOR’s Fab 40 (a list of top shops published every June) for more than a decade.

Long was making the rounds at an equipment OEM booth, there to learn how MEC could expand its already significant investment in automation. During investor conference calls over the past year, MEC Chairman/President/CEO Robert Kamphuis has described just how valuable automation, along with the highly trained and competent people who run that automation, are during a time of extraordinarily variable demand. Like many fabricators, MEC’s 2020 production volume declined significantly and swiftly, but as it turns out, the rebound was just as significant. Good people, processes, and automated technology helped MEC keep the pace.

No doubt many of the other 24,000 attendees felt the same way. The industry is in a state of urgency that was particularly palpable at the show. The industry lacks people—skilled, semiskilled, unskilled, it doesn’t matter. To grow, fabricators have no choice but to turn to technology. They’re uncovering new machines, new software, new ways to connect shop systems and processes, and new strategies to build a company culture to make the most out of what technology can offer.

People and Technology

“If a shop has a toolbox full of toys, it becomes easier to find people.”

So said attendee Glen Zimmerman, owner of New Holland, Pa.-based Raytec LLC, a diversified manufacturer with a custom sheet metal fabrication operation that’s pushing the technological envelope in many ways. The company has 15- and 20-kW fiber lasers situated next to a recently expanded automation line with a punch/shear system alongside panel bending. Between the initial feeding of the blank and the final bend, no one touches the part.

With all this automation, finding the right person becomes all the more important. “We try to find that self-motivated person who’s interested in expanding their knowledge,” he said. “We also ensure they know that this toybox full of technology isn’t all fun and games. There’s work involved.”

Slat cleaning is a prime example. Zimmerman explained that his operators aren’t above cleaning slats—and considering all the laser power the company has, they clean those slats quite often. Because they do it so often, it only takes 15 minutes or so. They often get the job done while the laser is cutting a sheet on the other slat table.

The company takes a holistic approach to operator training. They do more than just load programs and push buttons on the control. They talk with programmers about tabbing strategies and how it affects the denesting operation. They inspect the bellows above the cutting head for holes. They lubricate bearings. They pay attention to the cut in action and look out for potential tip-ups. Automation doesn’t mean they’re sitting back and doing nothing. On the contrary, automation has made each worker—including their experience and technical expertise—more valuable than ever.

The Dangers of a Shallow Talent Pool

Technology at its best lifts a workforce. Sales per employee rises. As employees learn and accomplish more, they make more money as they climb the career ladder. Automation in the hands of the curious and creative can lead to great things.

At its worst, technology helps make the unskilled, uninterested, and unengaged marginally productive, at least for a while. Even those who appreciate the technology might find themselves in a dead-end career if they’re never given the right training to grasp the whole picture of metal fabrication, the foundational elements that the shop hands of old had no choice but to learn. They didn’t have software and automation to lean on. A high-tech fab shop with a shallow talent pool looks nice, but it’s just a façade, and it’s certainly not sustainable.

It’s easy to see how all this comes to fruition, especially now as the baby boomers retire and all too often takes their knowledge with them. Metal fabrication is undergoing a great generational shift, and knowledge sharing has never been more important. Here, too, technology can help.

At FABTECH, Steve Zubrzycki pointed to the computer screen at his booth. He showed a video of someone operating a machine, bringing the viewer step by step through a certain set of tasks—nothing out of the ordinary there. But then, he demonstrated how that video was made. The video wasn’t rough. It incorporated diagrams and subtitles, even translations to different languages. The editing of that video had been accomplished automatically through artificial intelligence (AI).

Zubrzycki is customer success manager at Detroit-based DeepHow, a 3-year-old company that’s designed a way to streamline the video recording, editing, and posting process. Using a specialized video capture app, someone with a phone records a shop veteran performing a specific task and uploads the video. From there, DeepHow’s AI edits it to make it part of a manufacturer’s training regimen. The technology exemplifies how old-school craft meets the disruptive technology of the present.

“Our entire goal is to help companies close the skills gap in manufacturing,” Zubrzycki said. “The technology is designed to be scalable across organizations, even globally.”

The Role of Creativity

Such knowledge builds the foundation for true fabrication creativity, which is why many get into the metal fabrication business in the first place (it certainly isn’t to get rich quick). Creativity comes in two forms—craft and process—and these days a fabricator needs both to thrive.

That shop veteran being recorded for DeepHow’s video training drew from years of craftsmanship. With that knowledge, the shop veteran sees a difficult drawing not as an impossibility, but a challenge. So, you want to bend 6061-T6 aluminum into a form with tight radii—without cracking? Instead of throwing up their hands, creative craftspeople visualize how they could incrementally bend it on a press brake with the right tools and careful handling.

Then there’s process creativity, which comes into play when fabricators look at entire processes and aim for holistic improvement, from raw stock to the shipping dock. This is where continuous improvement and Industry 4.0 steps into the picture. And as usual, the FABTECH conference had multiday programs covering each.

This year many of the ideas espoused about Industry 4.0 and disruptive technologies—AI, machine learning, Industrial Internet of Things, and all the rest—had a practical bent. They weren’t pie-in-the-sky concepts.

For instance, Mo Abualio, PhD, managing partner of IoTco, a digital transformation consultancy based in Cincinnati, described a welding application in which inspection cameras viewed welded seat frames and, through AI, learned how to determine whether a weld was good or bad. “The AI was trained to look for good images and burn-through images,” he said, “then send that data immediately back to the [manufacturing execution system].” Most significant, these cameras were neither sophisticated nor expensive. Each cost less than $300—more proof that AI and other disruptive technologies aren’t just for multibillion-dollar corporations.

The same could be said for a variety of sensing technologies. Abualio described a stamping application that integrated acoustic sensors. They weren’t integrated within the die or press but instead sat stationary several feet away, nowhere near any harsh environment. The setup was simple, nonintrusive, and inexpensive.

“This application gave us predictive quality using acoustic sensing,” Abualio said, explaining that the bottom of a press stroke produces sound signatures that change when something goes awry. Imperceptible to the naked ear, these differences give evidence of quality issues, and a simple sensor setup can detect them within mere microseconds after they occur.

A New Era

Michael Bell, director of sales at Pemamek LLC based in Mason, Ohio, pointed to a picture that towered over his booth. It showed a two-station welding setup on an 800-ton steel structure more than 15 m in diameter, between 120 and 130 mm thick. What once required a host of manual welders now is being welded automatically, with three seams being laid down simultaneously over a semi-narrow gap, X bevel configuration, all with adaptive-fill technology.

“One person operates all of that,” Bell said. He emphasized that welders didn’t lose their jobs; the company simply couldn’t find the number of welders it needed to meet demand and so turned to automation.

Technology on display at FABTECH 2021 showed an industry in transition, one in which creativity is valued more than ever and new technology empowers those who know the metalworking craft. Judging by the excitement from those who were on the show floor—an exhibit space that hadn’t seen such traffic in more than 18 months—the fun has only just begun.

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.