Metals Manufacturing and Fabricated Metal Parts & Products

Transform your business into a highly responsive enterprise that makes profitability look easy.

Contact Us

Smart manufacturing for metal parts and metal products companies

Metals manufacturing has always felt the pressure to adapt to changing requirements as market and customers’ needs shift rapidly. Intense global competition and shorter product lifecycles drive metal parts and products manufacturers to forge new paths to increase flexibility and profitability.

Trusted by global companies for smart manufacturing:

Toward Zero helps you address today’s market demands and prepare for tomorrow’s unforeseen pressures, so that your business can grow profits.

Metals manufacturing is an intensely complex market:

  • Thin margins
  • Customer demand for quality and value-added services accelerating
  • Fierce competition, locally and globally
  • Volatile raw material costs
  • Customer price sensitivity
  • Always-increasing customer requirements and complexity

Modern processes, techniques, and technologies can help your organization win despite the pressure.

As you look for new opportunities to grow revenue and maintain healthy margins, digitally-powered initiatives like operational excellence, continuous improvement, and Lean keep your business strong. Even if the organization is eager for modernization, it might not know where to get started or how to make the gains sustainable.

Overcome complex pressures common for metals manufacturing.

Toward Zero helps you set priorities for processes, culture, and technology so you can overcome the complex pressures and obstacles so common in metals manufacturing today:

  • Ensure your business is flexible and profitable while delivering on customer service
  • Get high-quality products to your customers on time and without compromising operational efficiency or margins
  • Uncover and act on performance opportunities and ensure gains are sustainable
  • Use continuous improvement, metrics, and analytics on the shop floor and in business processes to achieve operational efficiency
  • Establish processes and systems to capture and apply tribal knowledge from retiring workforce
  • Help you choose the right technologies to serve the business while attracting younger, digitally savvy workers
  • Recommend the right mix of technologies so you ensure customer service, increase flexibility, and grow margins
  • Juggle complex and operations along with fast-changing order variations
  • Reduce waste in production and processes
  • Reduce downtime, increase OEE, and achieve optimal production scheduling
  • Achieve regulatory compliance and meet industry standards without eroding operational performance or margins
  • Eliminate data gaps across legacy “vintage” machines

LEARN MORE

CNC machineMachine Shops

Machine shops (machining, CNC, and precision machined products) typically have smaller but more complex and varied lot sizes, demand for greater precision, and quality pressures, make running a CNC or machining operation more challenging than ever before. These factors may mean intricate engineering and re-engineering of parts, process variation for alternate materials, and premature tool wear or failure. The result can be bottlenecks and a less-than-efficient operation that affects on-time delivery, overtime, re-work and other operational metrics.

steel manufacturingSteel Manufacturing

The steel industry holds plenty of opportunity for growth and profit but still faces its share of threats and challenges. To operate profitably in the long-term amidst an increasingly competitive environment, steel manufacturers must strive to address logistics prices around solid waste management, avoiding excess capacity, rapid demand growth, and availability and price volatility of raw materials. As steel manufacturers look to infrastructure and technology to meet these concerns head-on, they must also properly optimize and integrate processes, technologies, and the workforce for optimal results.

metal castingMetals Casting

Despite inexpensive and efficient processes, metals casting companies face complex challenges in today’s market. Digitalization, rapidly retiring workforce, shifting market and customer requirements, and heavy utility consumption are common concerns among metals casting companies. Add in highly complex supply chain disruptions and raw materials and logistics price pressures, metals castings companies are eager to capitalize on modernization and operations performance improvements.

lathe metal manufacturingMetal Fabrication

Metal cutting, folding, welding, punching, shearing, stamping, and casting businesses also have diverse needs and challenges. Collectively, these sectors produce products and parts for machines, appliances, automobiles, transportation and heavy equipment, cookware, and tools/hardware and many other applications. As a result, they must navigate the endless requirements, regulations, standards, and demands customers place on them. Quality will always be a top concern and today businesses also face shorter product lifecycles, more product customization, short planning horizon and short delivery times, skilled labor shortages, and pressure to reduce capital tied up in inventory. Organizations of every size are looking to data-driven manufacturing to overcome challenges and achieve greater profitability.

additive manufacturingAdditive Manufacturing

Slow production speeds can be an obstacle if you’re in a mass serial production industry like automotive or consumer goods. Part-to-part variation may impact your ability to compete if your customers or market sector have strict quality standards. Your goal is to maximize every efficiency and quality opportunity to manufacture and deliver highest quality products as quickly as possible.

10 Success Factors for Production Scheduling

How can we make the most of APS?

Learn how other companies maximize the investment in production scheduling software.

Are you ready to set the stage for success with production scheduling software?  Help your company make better decisions about planning and scheduling software.

Read the ebook

Smart Manufacturing 101: Which Machine Data is Right for OEE

Which machine data is right for OEE?

Learn how to avoid the "all data is better" syndrome.

Despite advances in collecting data from HAAS machines, a lot of manufacturing execs are still at odds about which machine data is required to calculate OEE. Internal debates can sidetrack projects early on. A 35+ year veteran of machine tool data explains how to set priorities around machine data for OEE.

Read about it

Collect machine data for smart manufacturing - get help and advice

Need help to collect data from CNC machines?

Collecting CNC machine data doesn't have to be hard.

Getting access to machine data can be frustrating and confusing. That doesn't mean your company has to skip older equipment or machines with proprietary protocols.  If you're unsure what approach is right for your company or specific machines, get advice from a machine connectivity expert.

Get help to collect data from CNC machines

Let's connect

Toward Zero builds and implements custom solutions that reduce rework and drive profits. How can we help you?

Contact Us