Metals Manufacturing and Fabricated Metal Parts & Products
Transform your business into a highly responsive enterprise that makes profitability look easy.
Transform your business into a highly responsive enterprise that makes profitability look easy.
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.
Metals manufacturing is an intensely complex market:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.