Digital transformation can be a competitive advantage instead of a headache

Metal parts and products companies have always felt tremendous pressure to adapt to changing requirements as market and customers’ needs shift. Intense global competition and shorter product lifecycles drive metal parts and products manufacturers to forge new paths to increase flexibility and profitability. Your company doesn’t have time or resources for transformation projects that stall or fail, or worse, projects that don’t deliver on ROI expectations.

It’s time to evaluate and execute which initiatives will create the most opportunity for your business, meet the most pressing performance objectives, and accelerate competitive advantage.

Market demands and unforeseen industry pressures make it hard to grow profits and the business

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

It’s difficult to evaluate which modern processes, techniques, and technologies will have the greatest impact. Then, implementation and aligning with initiatives like operational excellence, continuous improvement, and Lean can be a tricky business. Even if your organization is eager for modernization, it might not know where to get started or how to make the gains sustainable.

Metals manufacturing companies have a unique mix of pressures and challenges that make it hard to establish priorities for transformation. How will your business:

  • Ensure it’s 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

Metal manufacturing companies trust On Time Edge for digital transformation

Our people understand metal industry manufacturing. And that’s exactly why we invest the time to fully understand your unique ecosystem of manufacturing processes, business processes, IT-OT architecture, and most importantly, your culture. We design, build, and integrate your system to fit your situation. Then we train, support, and empower your team to get the results you expect.

Challenges and opportunities unique for the kind of metals business you run

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.

Get the value you expect from digital transformation, quickly and sustainably

Digital transformation is our business. We are experts at deploying and integrating supply chain solutions and smart manufacturing systems – on time and within budget. The result is fast time-to-value and sustainable business value.