MetalForming: What is the most notable operational trend you’re seeing among metal formers and fabricators?

Bieszczat: More metal fabricators and formers have begun to rely on automation to increase their capacity utilization. The pandemic-era spike in demand for consumer and medical products led many metal fabricators and other manufacturers to build out their production capacity. Demand has since slackened, leaving more machines to run fewer cycles and run jobs less frequently. This has led some fabricators to hold labor headcount flat and ask existing workers to perform a wider variety of tasks.

In 2025, we expect demand—and, therefore, capacity-utilization rates—to once again increase with the rise in onshoring. However, we believe metal fabricators will continue holding labor headcount relatively flat and instead rely more on robotic- and vison-system-based automation technologies, which have taken significant steps forward in ease of use and affordability.

This will push the concept of the connected worker even further into the front-line strategies of metal fabricators. Here, the objective will be enabling fewer people to perform multiple tasks by providing semi-autonomous automation aids in workcenter job instructions, inline quality inspections, and systems for workflow tracking and exception reporting. Fewer people will each oversee multiple workcenters, aided by modern technologies enabled by abundant machine intelligence and computational horsepower.

MetalForming: Artificial intelligence (AI), especially generative AI, continues to capture considerable attention. What is the greatest impact you see?

Bieszczat: Strikingly, the interest generated by AI also has created a greater awareness of what can be done with data and traditional analytics by using more conventional tools. My favorite example is when the announcers during a recent football game said Google Analytics had proven that a particular quarterback completes 67% of his passes—that calculation easily could have been performed using Microsoft Excel. 

Of course, the analytics required for managing production, inventory, finance and other manufacturing operations are inherently more complex. So, we’re seeing significant interest among metal fabricators in using the data and analytics that they already own—in their enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution system (MES) software, for example—to make data-driven decisions. This trend will accelerate in 2025.

MetalForming: At the same time, is it possible that the growing use of smart machines will reduce the need for MES software?

Bieszczat: It might seem that the need for traditional MES production and process-monitoring software will be diminished by the growing adoption of smart machines, which can track uptime, downtime, cycle counts and more. However, the growing use of smart machines will only expand the value of MES software, which will become metal fabricators’ data aggregators.

On their own, smart machines are islands of information. However, when connected to MES software they become important nodes in an enterprise-wide network of production and process data. Smart machines help to solve the industry challenge of how to reliably record and access production data. And, with their native data-collection and data-transfer interfaces, these machines make it straightforward for an MES to collect, consolidate and report information throughout a metal fabricator’s organization. The internet of things (e.g., small data-collection devices), therefore, becomes the internet of machines. 

MetalForming: Is the relationship that metal fabricators have with technology changing in other ways?

Bieszczat: There’s a growing generational shift in how manufacturing executives in the metal-fabrication sector use data and interact with ERP systems that collect and deliver this information. The industry largely has switched to dashboards and similar data-visualization techniques. Dashboards make information more actionable and also make data and insights more broadly available to management and front-line workers.

In addition, we’re seeing a new generation of manufacturing executives—who have grown up in a digital world—moving beyond an ERP system’s standard reports and making the low-code/no-code ERP dashboard tools their preferred method of information delivery. We expect to see more of these digital natives going directly to the ERP system’s database, to mine, compile and present exactly the information they want to drive their decision-making. It’s one more way that metal formers and fabricators are evolving into data-driven businesses to maximize their productivity, efficiency and productivity while planning for future growth. MF

See also: Dassault Systemes

Technologies: Management

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