Bystronic Voice Blog

Fiber lasers consume up to three times less energy than CO2 and are capable of up to five times faster speeds depending on power and material thickness.

As a shop owner, executive, or manager, one of your many priorities includes evaluating existing machines on the shop floor and when necessary, replacing them with newer, more efficient, and productive machinery.

If you are a sheet metal fabricator currently using high-power fiber lasers in your fabrication process, then you already realize the capacity demands that are being imposed on your process chain.

In today’s competitive fabricating environment, the reduction of non-value manufacturing time and total processing times is essential for maintaining a competitive edge.

In today’s fast-paced production environment, the ability to have a high-level overview and control of all released production jobs, and to monitor their status, is essential to production management and maintaining on-time delivery schedules.

Continual improvements in manufacturing are a mainstay of remaining competitive. Without machine and production data, both in real-time and historical, there are no means to measure processes objectively. The fact is, you cannot improve what you cannot measure.

How does the cost to operate older CO2 laser cutting machines compare to today’s Fiber laser cutting machines?

Improving your metal fabricating value chain requires continuous attention. Not just to tweak current processes, but also to keep an open mind toward improving with the latest available innovations.

Gaining the edge in today’s competitive market requires intelligence derived from data and the ability to act upon information to improve processes and machine performance.

As mentioned in our previous series, we’ve identified some of the most common areas for process variability and bottlenecks in the metal fabricating value chain. Press brake efficiency and capacity are at the top of most fabricator’s minds when bottlenecks are in question.

In continuation of our multi-part series on analyzing the value chain, we now look at manual CNC press brake bending operations. CNC bending operations continue to be a mostly manually intensive task for the majority of fabrication shops, although advancements in technology have reduced the overall setup time associated with press brake operations.

In Part 2 of our multi-part blog series on analyzing the metal fabricating value chain, we will analyze the flow of the raw material. More specifically, how efficiently is material being presented to the laser cutting system and how efficient is the unloading, sorting, and stacking of the finished cut parts.

So what does your metal fabricating value chain look like? Can you already determine where your improvements will come from?