Roll forming is an industry that demands skilled and talented workers to achieve all the advantages it has to offer. Repeatability and consistency are two of the beneficial features of roll forming products to a range of application and industries. To maintain these advantages, roll forming needs a talented workforce and/or automation to continue in the future effectively.
The manufacturing market today is a global market and the demands for superior quality in the desired quantity have to be delivered, with the cost to remain competitive. Companies today use programs internally and externally to accomplish these three areas. Continuous improvement programs create metrics for managers to monitor processes, to eliminate waste, and to ensure the process is performing at its top level. These programs also create opportunities to improve the processes with labor, machine, and method.
Many articles use the term skilled labor but where are all the people to fill all the jobs that require skilled labor? There are many opinions of what is happening in the industry from the lack of people looking for work to the idea that manufacturing jobs are not attractive to graduating students. Whatever the reason, the fact remains there is a shortage and something needs to fill the void. One solution is to thoughtfully apply automation technology.
How is the current roll forming process monitored?
The term managers hate to hear is that roll forming is a black art. Over the years, having been in numerous manufacturing plants, most of them have a single, in-house expert that can best setup and troubleshoot the roll formers for best performance. As the go-to person, the roll forming expert has many years of experience. They can be understandably irritable and cranky because they never get a break or time off. They have the feel to make the tooling work correctly with feeler gauges or sense the pressure of the feel through the wrench to set the tooling. This term feel is the black art some say. The feel is difficult to repeat, document, and explain. Even experts will say they all have a different feel.
Today the roll form expert in many manufacturing facilities is reaching the retirement age. The experience they have is very difficult to duplicate and pass onto someone else. It takes reasoning, troubleshooting, and mechanical skills to perform the task, along with honing the feel over years of trial and error experiences. Offloading all this knowledge to the next generation seems impossible. Often, companies are trying to offload this knowledge in a year or less.
To reduce the time it takes to train a new expert in the black art of roll forming many companies are replacing the in-house expert with process engineers. The idea of adding this to the process engineer’s responsibilities seem reasonable. Many of them have mechanical and reasoning skills from their schooling. One of the obstacles they have to overcome is that roll forming is not taught in engineering or vocational classes. This manufacturing process has been around for a long time but it is not as popular as stamping. This creates the need for a learning curve. They have to learn the feel.
With obstacles such as a retiring or declining workforce, training struggles, lack of documentation, etc. gaps are often created. This gap results in longer set up times, more incorrect setups (scrap), and loss of productivity. With these issues, the roll forming industry is looking for solutions.
Click here to read part two: How Roll Forming Automation Eases Demands on Experts