Breaking down the information silos at FABTECH

FABTECH was held in Atlanta four years ago, and it returns to the Georgia World Congress Center this week. Gareth Sleger

Imagine walking on a custom metal fabricator’s shop floor in 2022. You probably see a hive of activity: lasers cutting, press brakes bending, welders welding. People are working through the backlog, trying their best to catch up. You also might see piles of work in process (WIP), and a lot of them look like they’ve been sitting there for some time.

Ask around and you’ll find WIP is gathering dust not because some upstream process made too many parts, or because a downstream constraint in welding, powder coating, or assembly. It’s because of some purchased component, like a piece of hardware, isn’t available.

This is what choked supply chains look like from the ground level. As this year’s FABTECH show gears up at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta this week, tens of thousands of fabricators will converge and look for ways to ensure they can deliver, even amid mayhem in the broader supply chain.

Some will be looking for equipment that helps get more out of the expertise they have. As always, flexibility will be paramount. Fabricators want to be able to drop in a program to a laser, perhaps a press brake with automatic tool change, produce a hot job, then return to the production order at hand.

The metal fabrication business is no stranger to the hot job. It’s the nature of the beast. But as the supply chain recovers and interest rates (and, hence, the cost of money) rise, shop managers are scrutinizing that WIP and supply-chain delays in general.

When it comes to WIP in particular, if hardware wasn’t available, why was the job released in the first place? For that matter, why wasn’t the lack of hardware known when initial promises were made, when the quote was submitted and the customer accepted?

”There’s a lack of connectivity across the industrial supply chain. And as you move through the tiers of the industrial supply chain, the quality of information declines. We can fix that problem.”

That was Jason Ray, CEO and co-founder of Boston-based Paperless Parts, a cloud-based quoting platform. Dring a pre-FABTECH interview, Ray described an industry supply chain with a serious lack of transparency. On top of this, information tends to degrade the farther down the tiers you go. Designers start with a powerful 3D-CAD file, then convert to a STEP file as they start the procurement process. Lower-tier suppliers, including many precision sheet metal fabricators, are left with a PDF. Sometimes they can get a 3D-CAD file, sometimes not.

Ray described how little information some vendors receive, especially outside service providers. Plating companies might get a redacted print. The plating provider’s vendors might just get a bill of materials (BOMs). A metal service center just gets a text message for an order, with no information about what that material will eventually become. “There are a million different ways you could drive an enormous amount of collaboration through a common digital thread,” he said.

The idea of the digital thread has been talked about for years. “We now connect the machines in our facilities. We need to build an industrial cloud to collect data from machines and perform a deep analysis. And we’re creating a digital thread to communicate with customers and supply chain partners.”

That was said at a keynote during FABTECH 2015 by Karen Kerr, who at the time was managing director of GE Ventures. Her comment rings true today, and many attendees at FABTECH 2022 hope to inch at least a little closer to that ideal. To make this happen will require equipment and software connectivity and interoperability.

Flexible equipment—everything from integrated cutting and bending centers to press brakes that can be automated for one run, then switch to manual operation the next—has made industry headlines during the past decade. Some of that flexibility is needed to meet customer demand, but let’s be honest, some quick changeovers occur because people dropped the ball several rungs up the supply chain, and so now everyone’s scrambling.

Why did they drop the ball? Because they operate in information silos. The industry needs more technologies that help break down those information silos, not just within a fabricator’s four walls, but throughout the supply chain.