Smart Manufacturing Solutions for Metals Manufacturing and Fabrication

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

Machine 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 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.

Metals 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.

Metal 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 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.