Onshoring and reshoring have been driving up demand for metal fabrication plants across the US over the past few years. When demand spikes and deadlines loom, project managers in metal fabrication face a clear choice: automate or fall behind.
As a project manager, you’re uniquely situated to see where automation can bring the biggest improvements to your plant’s production floor and prepare you to tackle an increased volume of projects while keeping project timelines steady and production quality high.
As a PVF distributor, American Stainless has years of experience helping metal and pipe fabricators across the US Southeast execute project after project successfully. Over the years, we’ve gotten plenty of hands-on experience helping fabricators tackle the unique challenges of the industry.
In this guide, we’ll explore how you can use automation in your metal fabrication plant to ride upcoming waves of demand and stay on top.
How is Automated Fabrication Improving Productivity in Manufacturing?
Over the past fifty years, advances in automation have kept pushing up speed, precision, and efficiency in fabrication and manufacturing plants. At the same time, automation has been reducing costs and errors. Automated manufacturing and fabrication systems, after all, can operate continuously while maintaining consistent performance, which means higher throughput and higher quality results.
The more advanced automation technologies are integrated into fabrication and machining tools, the less human oversight they need to do their work, which frees up your human workers to take more strategic roles of deciding how these automated systems are used instead of doing the hard work themselves.
By reducing manual labor, robotic systems also reduce your human workers’ risks of repetitive motion injuries or exposure to other safety hazards on the job site. More work done at a higher level of quality and fewer risks of injuries and accidents benching essential personnel means you spend more of your time getting more done.
Why IoT Matters on the Shop Floor
Automation in the metal fabrication sector isn’t solely occupied by robots that perform essential tasks with minimal need for human intervention, though. Specific automation technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), are especially useful for improving productivity and efficiency in metal fabrication work.
IoT systems can connect sensors throughout your metal fabrication plant to a centralized database that constantly receives real-time information about the goings-on in your daily operations. As a result, you can:
- Gather statistics on the performance of your fabrication equipment and use predictive analytics to see when systems might need preventive maintenance. As a result, you can avoid expensive repairs and downtime while also reducing waste.
- Detect abnormalities or tolerance variations that human-led quality inspection processes might miss. This can reduce the risk of defective products leaving your plant or costly and time-consuming rework.
- Make sure your fabrication tools are being used properly. A clever use of sensors can help detect when tools are being misused, telling you where operators might need additional training as well as preventing tools from wearing out faster and requiring replacement sooner.
Today’s Innovations, Tomorrow’s Standard
As industrial robotics and control systems become more advanced and cheaper to produce, they will also become easier and cheaper to bring onto your fabrication plant’s floor, which means cost won’t be as high a barrier to modernizing metal fabrication.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
There are so many amazing things that today’s automation technologies can accomplish in metal fabrication plants. For example, 3D printing (also known as additive manufacturing) is making it easier to rapidly prototype complex parts and test different designs in plastic before committing to full-scale fabrication in metal. Artificial intelligence technologies enable robotic systems to “learn” and improve their efficiency as they work. Collaborative robots, or “cobots,” are designed specifically for humans to work alongside without the need for safety cages or fencing.
These are some of the innovations that exist today. Who knows what will exist tomorrow? Only time will tell.
Tips for Project Managers: How to Embrace Automation in Your Metal Fabrication Plant
There have been a lot of exciting new developments in industrial automation over the past few years, and if you’ve been keeping an eye on them—and how your competition might be using automation—your plant’s current automated systems might be showing their age. As a project manager, you’re in a prime position to see how the plant’s operations are running and where updating your existing systems can help.
To get the most out of automation:
- Start with a needs assessment. Take stock of how the plant is running and keep an eye out for bottlenecks, repetitive tasks, and areas prone to human error. These are the processes that stand to benefit the most from automation in your metal fabrication plant.
- Look for new systems that fit into your existing systems. Don’t fix what isn’t broken or throw the baby out with the bathwater. Narrow your scope to new automated systems that are compatible with your existing equipment and software, including production planning systems, inventory management, and quality control processes.
- Perform a cost-benefit analysis. Automation technology is getting cheaper with each passing year, but upgrading can still be costly. Tallying up the cost savings from reduced labor costs, enhanced precision, minimized waste, and increased throughput helps you justify a potentially expensive upgrade process to the people holding the purse strings.
Automation Readiness Checklist for Project Managers
Ask yourself:
- Do we have repeat processes causing slowdowns?
- Are safety incidents tied to manual work?
- Do our machines talk to each other (IoT-ready)?
- Are we tracking OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness)?
- Can our team support a phased automation rollout?
American Stainless: Your Partner in Steel Supply
You can tackle a lot of the metal fabrication industry’s toughest challenges by making the most of automation in your metal fabrication plant, but first, you need the metal.
American Stainless and Supply is known across the US Southeast as a leading distributor of the world’s best steel pipe, valves, and fittings. But our product offerings don’t stop at PVF products. In addition to steel pipe and tube, you’ll find a wide range of structural materials perfectly suited to providing the supports that heavy-duty machining and fabrication equipment needs.
Pipe fabricators can also rely on American Stainless for valve actuators, positioners, and switches to incorporate essential automation capabilities into industrial pipelines and process lines.
With dedicated customer service from experts who know what solutions work best for your project and lightning-fast, accurate order fulfillment and shipping, American Stainless is here to keep you supplied with everything you need to do your best work and deliver your best results.