Bystronic Voice Blog

Today’s modern metal cutting and bending machines can communicate production data directly to manufacturing software that will segment the data into subsets for analysis.

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.

Fiber laser technology has been the most significant driver for producing the technology needed to automate laser cutting machine operations due to its high productivity.

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. If two companies have the same equipment, what then becomes their competitive differentiation?

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?