On Shoulders of Giants – Part 2

Continued from Part 1 here.

Only fifteen years after my LeTourneau graduation did I realize that the availability of welding science expertise in industry is in fact, sadly rare. Even ridiculous. It hit me when Yoni Adoni (OSU/LeT-U) explained that the raw numbers for W.E. graduates and Welding Engineer job titles reveals that 70% of “Welding Engineers” don’t have the degree. As the overwhelming rule of thumb, they are “familiar” with one or two welding processes but have little or no welding science training.

This holds the weighty implications that degreed W.E. compensation centers around the 85^th percentile, and that true, un-hyped “blue ocean” advantages exist for companies who infuse their company’s core with welding science competency and nurture it.

These realizations evoked yet another puzzling frustration: how could it be that 95% of company engineers, managers and executives, and 99% of HR managers or directors seem unable to comprehend and leverage such obviously valuable opportunity, fully exploiting welding science for competitive advantages? Surely I’m not the only one with two eyes in my head!

Like Morpheus’ splinter illustration to Neo (The Matrix), there was a splinter in my mind: amidst all of this there were two things that especially stumped me over the years. First, the wide gap between EWI’s applied welding process expertise, and my expertise. Second was a maddening, incomprehensible industry-wide ignorance that is blind to the existence of both welding sciences and welding engineers.

1. How could I have TWICE unknowingly come into a facility behind an Edison Welding Institute (EWI) TEAM investigation report, and bested EWI engineers by predicting and delivering welding process improvements of 500%+ beyond what their evaluation said was possible? There is nothing shabby about EWI’s remarkable achievements – they are arguably the most renowned and most capable pool of consulting welding expertise on the globe.
   So how does this make any sense?  How is it that:

• A new (1993?) Carrier compressor plant told me that their single biggest problem – a joint made by one simultaneous 10-point Resistance Projection Weld – couldn’t be fixed until they re-designed and re-tooled a completely different approach, which would total nearly a half-million dollars. I objected that it posed no problem to weld, and was probably a superior design – despite the new-launch failure rate which often exceeded 50%. But those decisions made several days earlier were grounded in the fact that both the RW machine builder and an EWI team had concluded that it could not work and that the only solution was to revert to an industry-standard design. I looked it over for 15 minutes, went back and told him all he had to do was reduce the force, increase the amps and volts, and shorten the weld time, and it should be no problem. A week later they let me and a T.J. Snow staffer take 45 minutes (wink) to develop a new weld schedule and machine settings. 30 minutes later, they couldn’t separate more than two projections in over 50 hits from a 32-oz ballpeen hammer (literally) that completely flattened all the sheet metal. Yet, until that moment, whacking it twice without snapping it completely off was labeled as “good” because that was the best ever accomplished.
  What?!!?
  How do I make sense of erasing this simple half-million dollar “impossibility” in 30 minutes, with no tooling or machine hardware changes, based on a 15 minute evaluation?  Were EWI’s main RW experts and the RPW machine-builder’s lead staff ALL on longggg vacations? Can’t any good welding engineer do this stuff?
• A two-week EWI team investigation in the mid-90’s provided a filled three-inch ring-binder report which concluded that Copeland Corp’s (Emerson Electric) flagship scroll-compressor plant headquarters production facility was doing fantastic in their RPW/GMAW/Brazing/Friction-welding production as the industry leaders and that they might be able to accomplish 5 to 10% reductions in welding rework & scrap. Months later after a pre-interview one-hour plant tour, I was shown charts on their weld defect/scrap tracking, and pointedly asked how much improvement I thought was possible. Encouraged to sit and ponder it at length, I took four minutes to consider everything I’d seen on the floor, and told Gerry Ulrich that with teamwork we could cut those rates by 50% the first year and cut it in half again the second year for a 75% reduction.
  When Gerry asked my certainty, I said I was confident in the first 50%, and felt the 2^nd year was a bit conservative because I suspected we could do better. (I knew nothing about EWI’s study and report until months later.)  A year later we were at 50%, and ending the 2^nd year we had reduced FPY losses by 80% since my interview. (Although Copeland never understood what really happened or how to fully leverage it, varying portions of what I accomplished was franchised into many new plants across the US and the globe.)But any good welding engineer can do this, right?  Ten years into my career, my confidence in that assumption was eroding, and it disturbed me. I was perplexed by EWI’s inability to provide more benefit to their customer than they did with four(?) W.E.’s in two weeks, but I slid it unexplained onto the back burner, where this puzzle intruded into my mind a thousand times.

2. How is it possible that the 95%+ majority of manufacturers who daily sell their expertise at making complex welded assemblies think that they do something else, just because it superficially looks like an aerospace battery enclosure, an EGR cooler, an automotive seat frame, a truck axle, a nuclear valve, or a compressor?
   Worse, companies think that staff or vendors without extensive welding science training can design and program a welding automation system that is infused with process expertise to deliver high-profit, high quality results with huge competitive advantages. That will NEVER, EVER happen – yet that myth appears to be the prevailing “conventional wisdom”

The final piece of my mental puzzle was in coming to grips with myself. “I want to make a difference” is an inadequately shallow description. In every job I’ve ever had, my goal has been to understand the company and chart a path to guide their unique cultural blend of talent through thousands of un-comprehended complex details, to reach achievements and performance levels that had never been thought possible. This, too, I imagined was something that “every good welding engineer” did.  But they don’t.

All of this spiraled into many interwoven questions that tumbled in my mind for years like threads in a dryer, seeming to defy every attempt to untangle and weave them into a cohesive, accurate explanation:

• WHAT IS SO WRONG WITH EXECUTIVE MANAGEMENT TRAINING PROGRAMS THAT EVEN VERY SHARP EXECUTIVES DON’T SEE A GRADUATE WELDING ENGINEER AS A VITAL TECHNICAL ENGINEERING MANAGER ON THEIR DIRECT-REPORT TEAM?
• Why do very smart people see no problem when technically ignorant people get to override a degreed welding engineer with financially costly errors that demand long hours from their W.E. to even partially compensate for them?
• Endlessly following mythical welding “facts”, tribal “knowledge” and committee-decision technical nonsense… how is that a good strategic policy for explosive growth and low turnover of their most crucial technical expertise?
• How is it not inherently obvious that as the most complex industrial processes by far, blending more sciences and interactive process control variables than any other, welding science must become a Core Competency if they are to ever remotely approach their facility and corporate potential?
• How can a leading automotive Tier I supplier of welded metal assemblies believe that a major quality spill is due merely to an accidentally deleted pause after arc-start, before the robot starts moving? How can they not see the true root cause is in not having one single welding engineer among more than 10,000 employees in over 50 global facilities, and that such blindness makes costly welding quality problems a certainty?

It is questions like these that kept me puzzling, got me researching, and kept haunting me. Finally I’m at a point in my career where the many complexities have coalesced, and I’ve been able to analyze and rationalize these systemic industry roadblocks.

In a simple nutshell, here is the core root-cause of these blindnesses:
Industry and management are ignorant of the existence and power of welding sciences and welding engineering, simply because they’ve never been taught.

Some have been told, but very rarely have they been taught.  A three-page e-mail to an engineering & management team is a sure-fail method to teach them a foreign language and culture that they have never been exposed to.  I know.  I’ve spent hundreds of hours trying to find ways to TELL, and it has only exhausted me while frustrating everyone.  Simple facts can be told, but complex matters can only be taught.

Why don’t at least SOME companies recognize this “blue ocean” opportunity and infuse welding science as a core competency with a determined growth strategy, and include serious succession planning for senior welding engineering staff?

Don’t companies want to make money, gain marketshare, and catapult their future forward?

Yes.  But in the stark manufacturing world beyond CATERPILLAR and John Deere, such commonplace business goals are rarely applied to the practical welding sciences that are strewn across the entire plant. In this one arena of welding, this one arena only, the myths, excuses, guesses, tribal knowledge, medicine-men and folklore still substitute for common-sense business. Despite massive profit losses in welding, over 98% of executives, managers and engineers show no interest in welding performance data tracking that could de-cloak both those losses and their potentials.
Can’t they see the vastly untapped potential of welding science expertise? No. Definitely not.

After decades, I’ve realized there are definitive reasons for the common welding blindness’s of both engineers and managers, as well as executives. They are embedded firmly in the chronological industrial timeline, which is hinted at by the late appearance of welding physics, equipment and process development.  But the magnitude of this problem is revealed in a simple organizational survey question: how many of your staff have had at least one welding science, welding process, or welding equipment class? Contrast that with the classroom and lab training that welding engineering programs provide, and your first glimpse of the size of this chasm will come into view.

Despite being the most complex industrial processes, applied welding science studies were never mainstreamed into collegiate engineering, management, and manufacturing processes curriculum. In fact, only three universities ever created substantial ABET-accredited degrees in welding engineering. Understanding this history finally makes it possible, for the first time, to build effective strategies to unleash advancements and competitive advantages in this barely-explored territory.

I’m skilled at developing custom training programs – finding development bandwidth is the challenge.  Yet if I can find some means to get this knowledge into manufacturing management, engineering managers and corporate executives, and chart paths around the obstacles, my knowledge could enable immense sea-change benefits.  If I can pave that road, then a few other welding engineers and their companies will be able to follow.

On that coins’ flip-side, if I do not find my voice, and ways to speak up and speak effectively, it’s unlikely that my abilities will ever be used to the extents they could be leveraged to transform profits and launch companies manufacturing welded assemblies into global orbits of excellence that leave historical legacies of market dominance.

Joe Beckhams’ parting advice and comments indirectly convinced me that I need to write the book I’ve pondered for the last decade:

Toward World Class Welding.

I probably should write it. But I naturally wonder, would there be significant interest? Would it make a difference?

Perhaps it would. Maybe the simple fact that words printed in a book that are being read by a company I don’t work for, could induce the assumption that I have noteworthy expertise in manufacturing welding process science.

If you’ve read this far, thank you for enduring my rambling points of repetition and questionable literary skills.  As a reward, I offer this career-long observation that I hope you’ll take to heart:

Any manufacturer with “good” welding processes who lacks a welding-degreed engineer among more than a hundred employees is very likely losing more than 10-times in profits what a full-time Smart Welding Engineer would cost – one who could deliver those lost profits to the bottom line.

My talents shouldn’t go to waste when they could make a large impact for countless facilities.  So if you’d like my assistance in any strategic or technical welding area, I do have weekends and some vacation time available.  E-mail me and we’ll explore from there.

 

The Hall of Giants

My most notable mentors were/are these men:

• Bill Dorsey, an Electrical Engineer steeped in applied welding engineering who led development of one of the most successful and respected power supplies in the welding equipment industry, known in combination with the MIG-35 feeder for its exceptionally smooth arc, its dependable arc-starting, and its durable reliability. Bill was my main mentor. His brilliant mind was evident, and my frequent exposure to his systematic logical troubleshooting of welding processes and equipment, with running educational commentary, had value beyond description. In many ways, though I suspect it was unintended, I became his unpublished protégé.   My absorbed abilities in welding system design evaluation and improvement have never been tapped to any extent beyond benchmarking and predicting production performance results.
• Ted Toth, a quiet in-the-shadows immigrant genius whose main legacy was the architecture and control algorithms for the legendary Digipulse 450 that especially ruled Electric Boat for over a decade and the Korean shipyards for two decades. Ted was genuinely excited to work with me ten years after I left L-TEC/ESAB N.A., to take the waveform I developed for automotive exhaust with 409/439MC and give me a fully synergic version across the whole WFS range.   Then months later I called him with a proposal for how I would love to see tip-burnback-prevention built into the main arc control loop logic. With only a few minutes of my explanation of the control-logic approach, Ted was excited to plunge into it. Perhaps three weeks later he called to announce he was e-mailing me a new .bin to burn into the Digipulse E-ProM’s on our robotic welding systems. It was an instant success that ESAB immediately leveraged for their Al welding customers, where the impact was 10x greater.
• Joe Devito, a quiet, confident hands-on welder/instructor/trainer/lab developer and more. He had more influence on me than he suspected.
• To Rex Young, thank you for being the man I grew to appreciate so deeply: a kind, fun, thoughtful gold-mine of expertise, knowledge and advice in all matters of Resistance Welding.
• To Tim Iorio, thank you for the opportunity to have some of your strategic vision and heart rub off onto me, along with other invaluable things. You are often remembered.
• To Joe Beckham, the value of your parting words cannot be measured in a mortal lifetime. Thank you. I’ll probably have more to say. But for now, refer to the narrative above.
• To Daniel Mann, you’re a marvel and a brother. You walk a narrow, unmarked, untraveled path that’s well beyond sight of the 10 or 15 year learning curve in your position. You are an awe-inspiring pioneer. I wish we had more time beyond the next firefight, to learn from one another, collaborate and fully deliver the results we’re capable of.  It would be epic.

 

7 Questions Reveal Do Your People Really “Know Welding”?

Having some people who “know welding” is usually considered adequate or good welding staffing in American industry.  In essence, if welding is occurring and products are shipping, managers and executives who know nothing about welding sciences will assume that they are adequately staffed for competition and growth.  But is that REALLY true in your company, or is it only a common and expensive assumption?  Here are seven important questions to gage whether your company’s welding science expertise is adequate:

1. How much money is being lost in weld scrap?
2. How many hours are being spent in weld repairs?
3. How many hours are being spent making “welding adjustments” to automated equipment?
4. What is your internal PPM (or DPMO) weld repair defect rate on products, and how much have you lowered that repair rate in the last year?
5. What is your external weld defect rate shipped to your customers, and how much have you lowered that over the last three years?
6. How many times a year does staff have to repair, reprogram or “touch up points” in welding automation that “crashed”?
7. What are your primary welding operation bottlenecks, and how much have you reduced their cycle time in the last three years?

Of course this isn’t an exhaustive list.  But if your welding staff expertise is excellent and adequately supported for your profitability, they can provide answers to all these questions in a day or less.  Questions 4, 5, and 7 all point to your facility’s continuous improvement environment in welding operations:  if you don’t measure, that’s a forfeit.  If you measure but you have no continuous improvement, it’s because your inadequate welding staffing is locked in firefighting mode and/or hopelessly lacking in welding science expertise.

It’s astonishing that with the complex chemical interactions and high-speed transitions between solid/liquid/gas states, involving the arc plasma, metallurgy, over a dozen process variables with multiple interactions, tooling design, fit-up variations, and dimensional distortion… that welding in America is still thought to be a “simple” process that doesn’t need a trained welder, a welding-process-trained programmer, a specifically trained welding engineer, or targeted scientific research.  If you imagine that you are a metal stamping company without a mechanical engineer or tool-and-die maker, perhaps you can correlate how wide-open the risk and potential is in most companies doing welding.

About 7 years ago as a Manufacturing Welding Engineering Manager, I assigned a task to the 7 or 8 bachelor’s welding engineering grads in my team from all three schools (Ferris, OSU, LeTourneau), to total up the hours they spent in college in welding classes, doing welding structure/metallurgy/process homework, or under the hood performing guided/graded welds. The average minimum was 4,000 hours… much higher for the Ferris guys due to all the “under the hood” time.  Our team applied that welding engineering expertise to great advantage.  What would your bottom line look like if you eliminated 90% of your weld repairs, shortened your welding cycle-times by 20%, reduced your shipped weld defects by more than 50%, and launched new lines that were running at full rate and low defects in the first 30 days?  That’s your funding motivation to staff and empower welding science expertise.

Still think your people “know welding”?

Valuable New Technologies – Arc Vision

How can you turbocharge your weld quality in mechanized welding? By viewing the weld, greatly magnified, with far greater clarity than possible with a welding shield, remotely from any location. How does this technology work, and why is it so much better? Cameron Serles’ blog post does a good job of explaining the basics of the breakthrough Xiris camera systems: http://blog.xiris.com/blog/bid/392061/How-to-Get-the-Best-View-of-an-Open-Arc-Weld

But beyond that, what about the hands-on opinion of an objective welding engineer?  This is a first-ever hands-on review in Visionary Welding, and it’s a story worth telling.  I was able to set up and demo a Xiris dual-camera setup in recent months with the help of the talented Cornelius Sawatzky, and coordinating aid from Machine and Welding Supply Company (Raleigh, NC branch, Mark Jeffries and Brent Ellis).  I saw fantastic benefits for long multipass mechanized welds. 

Here’s how I would cram the WOW into one paragraph:  The screen perspectives are astonishingly good – so good that it makes you want to put a Xiris camera on your head and a smartphone screen in your helmet for doing manual welding.  It’s like what you see on a dark cloudy night, vs. wearing night-vision goggles.  It’s like the difference between what you can see, and what Superman can see – courtesy of logarithmic light intensity processing that lets you see the puddle, the arc, and the surrounding material all at the same time.  You can toggle between auto-recording (when the arc is active), or manual recording modes.  The ability to capture everything during a weld means that welder operator training can move ahead by a light-year, just by reviewing and using video segments to show ideal techniques, weld defects as they occur, and methods of error recovery which may avoid weld repairs.

In reviewing the welding videos that we made during a couple of days of production, several things stood out:

1. The balanced location of the molten weld puddle has to be constantly monitored and frequently adjusted. The location needs to be adjusted not only to edges, but also to placement on the plane of the layer in planning for the width and sequence of beads that will effectively fill each required layer (and provide for post-weld machining to finish dimensions).  Doing this relies on proximity line-of-sight, which is normally limited, restricted, and distant: generally poor. Everything seen through a welding helmet lens under these conditions is difficult to interpret and even harder to teach.
2. Producing a perfect weld takes not only great interpretive visual skills but constant, non-distracted attention.  Both of those were “bionically” enhanced while welding with the camera system.
3. In historic mechanized welding, both the interpretive visual skills and this issue of non-distracted attention are not simply limited by the welder’s motivation: they are chained and blindfolded by the use of inadequately archaic manual technology. For example, the welder historically needs to peer through a welding hood and see the weld area clearly from more than one angle to properly interpret what is happening in the weld and in the joint. But, he cannot see everything clearly with only one lens shade, he can only get a second viewing angle by leaving the controls, and his eye is always at least three feet from the arc. So the welder functions in a world where everything is a compromise and he is limited to guesswork which is based on poor visual access, and a distant, squinting perspective.
4. Many things can be done with a standard single-camera Xiris system.  But through placement of two cameras, you can gain a view of both sides of the weld – giving the welder an instant and continuous advantage which they never had before.  With a tap of your finger or glove, you can switch between three arrangements of the two views to maximize the advantages for the needs of the moment.
5. “Supersize” the magnification advantage for the operator, or broadcast it to a wider, distant shop-floor audience by plugging in a big external flatscreen.  (Could be a high value deal-closer for customer visits or Open House events?)
6. The Xiris software provides the important ability to automatically adjust or manually “tweak” the image characteristics for maximum clarity advantages.  After all, there are great differences between welding processes, weld parameters, materials, and joint configurations.  But frankly, the results of activating the auto-adjust were hard to beat and as fast as a digital camera in Auto mode, making it obvious that Xiris has invested a lot of brainpower to make it easy to get optimal viewing results of the weld puddle and the entire welding area – at the same time.  Finally, the focal point of the camera has everything to do with how clearly you can see what you want to see.  But since these cameras have built-in focal-length motors and easy screen-tap changes of focal point, it’s fast to make on-the-fly adjustments to focal-length.

Considering these issues, it becomes more clear why Xiris’ dual cameras with logarithmic light intensity processing of magnified images is a gigantic enabler for weld quality perfection. Not only can the operator see the weld and surrounding areas perhaps 5 times better than even closeup through a welding shield, and not only is it magnified much larger, but he never needs to stand/squat/peer/duck/walk-around while leaving the controls to glimpse a different view. Because he is at the controls when he sees the first hint of a problem, and because he can interpretively identify it much sooner, he is able to adjust to avoid the problem – instead of recognizing and adjusting a few seconds after the problem is full-blown. 

It is primarily the nuanced details occurring within the weld puddle motion, puddle placement, puddle shape and solidification profile that determine the quality of the weld deposit. Because of this, it seems inherent that giving the welding operator this 10-times improvement in detailed visibility (that’s an understatement) should reduce remote mechanized welding defects by at least 70 to 90%… but I suspect it can probably enable 95% defect reductions in many situations.

All considered, the system seems pretty cost-effective, with fast payback in many production environments.  What’s the cost?  Think “best new cars on a budget” without fancy options or extra-status badges and you’ll have an idea of the price range.

What about the Xiris equipment design and durability?

Well-engineered design seemed evident in almost every aspect of the Xiris equipment:

• Engineered and tested durability in high-temperature environments, using Exair chilled compressed air in the temperature-monitored camera housings, and optional high-temperature insulating wraps. Its’ tested camera/cabling capabilities can comfortably handle a 500F preheat environment when fully outfitted.
• Matured control console design, with cooling and filtration
• Durable high-performance cabling with sealed end connectors
• Intuitive software interface  design, with graphic-symbol-driven screen layouts and screen swapping 
• Simple yet thorough system documentation
• 3-layer password levels
• Our optioned higher-storage capacity unit provided about 130 hours of dual-camera weld-arc recording time
• Amazing pixel achievements in the clarity and value of the highly engineered weld imaging
• Continued improvement efforts in the software-use details

In summary, I found the Xiris system is designed to be easy to use, easy to maintain, and quite durable with reasonable care and use.  How easy and intuitive was it to use?  I had confidently selected and labeled a hardback notebook, knowing that I would need to take a number of important notes on how to accomplish and recall various Xiris tasks and tricks.  I never do that, but I “knew” I would need it, and I wanted to “pick” Cornelius’ brain on such things.  I had the notebook with me the entire time, but I could never identify anything that I needed to write down: that’s how easy and intuitive it is to use, and how thorough the short Xiris system manual is. 

In short, this is disruptive, groundbreaking world class welding technology that’s not R&D: it’s ready for mainstream.  My congratulations to Xiris on a fantastic product line that should prove to be a game changer in profits and weld quality in many automated or mechanized welding applications.

Hunting for the Elephant Cloaking Device “OFF” Switch

During most of the last two decades of my Welding Engineering career, I’ve been searching for the “OFF” switch on the Elephant Cloaking Device.  95% of manufacturing companies lack the high profitability and the growth into market dominance which could be theirs, by turning off the cloaking device that hides their true core business, and embracing the elephant-sized key to profitable market dominance.  Manufacturing companies may think they are in appliances, or implements, or vehicles, or equipment, or devices, or actuators… just name it.  But they are really in the welding industry. Automotive is a perfect example: simply removing welding and brazing from a vehicle leaves nothing but a useless pile of disconnected and non-functional small sub-assemblies – and yet the entire automotive industry seems blind to that fact. It’s pervasive, and it’s top-down.

The “cloaked elephant” in most of the metal-manufacturing industries is that their actual core business is selling their expertise at manufacturing complex welded assemblies.  Because this elephant is cloaked, staff cannot see and grasp that their core success is inherently and tightly linked to the permeating depth and breadth of the scientific welding expertise that’s woven throughout their organizational structure… or, far more likely, is missing entirely.  One major supplier, a “household name” within automotive, is manufacturing complex welded system assemblies in dozens of countries without one single welding engineer, anywhere.  Lack of welding expertise was the overwhelming cause of a major “quality spill” that may have cost them over $50M, and is the reason they are probably doomed to repeat their losses.

The sad truth is that few manufacturers of welded metal assemblies understand and embrace their core business. Even amongst “world class” companies, there is rarely a discussion of world class welding.  How can they talk about Continuous Improvement, and leave welding out of the picture?  It’s due to invisibility – like an inability for normal sight to see something in plain sight, as if they were selectively blind.  In the vast majority of companies, the costly lack of welding expertise is the manufacturing lesson rarely seen and never learned.

Even though it should be painfully obvious, the lack of welding expertise is typically as invisible to upper management and executive staff as a sci-fi warplane or starship that’s hidden by a “cloaking device”.  The welding “starship” has the immense and unequaled power of “otherworldly” knowledge in the applied physics of the universe, yet it’s cloaked in the invisibility of those complex physics, always evading management visibility, nearly completely untapped and uncomprehended – the stuff of legends, heroes, and world domination or rescue.  But why?  For years I’ve puzzled over the reasons for this top-down invisibility, and I’ve drawn some conclusions…

Manufacturing Executives – What is Your Most Complex Process?

If your manufacturing production process includes welding assemblies together, here’s a valuable challenge. If you think it’s exaggeration to claim that arc welding is the most complex process in your plant, humor me for just one paragraph.  I bet you can’t name one other non-welding industrial process in your operations that is as complex as the most common arc-welding process: GMAW (Gas Metal Arc Welding, or MIG/MAG). GMAW (“MIG”) includes at least 13 variables, of which most are interactive with multiple other variables, and it joins metal via an open electric arc that creates simultaneous multi-phase high-speed transitions between solid, liquid, gaseous and plastic states to form 3-dimensional weld penetration profiles with various chemistries and conflicting/competing grain structures which have widely varying impacts on physical and chemical properties.

Think about it. Ask your engineering manager about it. Is there any process more complex?  Stamping? No. Extrusion molding? Nope. Machining? No again.

Are you convinced yet?  If so, here’s a question that’s likely worth a decade of your career:  how is your company doing in hiring, empowering and leveraging expertise in welding sciences to create a formidable level of competitive advantage and profitability?

Top 10 Strategies for Expensive Welding Automation

It seems some companies love expensive low-profit welding automation.  Two frequent ops approaches are substituting myths for facts, and not allowing a welding expert to make welding decisions. Here are my Top 10 Production Management Strategies for Expensive Welding Automation in the manufacturing plant:

1. “Just run it – that’s why we have weld repair”
2. “Anyone in maintenance is qualified to adjust welds”
3. “We can’t get time for PM’s” (we’ll take downtime instead)
4. “We had to postpone weld training to save money”
5. “If the weld fixture won’t run the parts, just shim it.”
6. “We need to find the welding guy [engineer] something to do: he spends too much time standing around doing nothing” (except watching the processes to engineer and plan improvements)
7. “We ordered cheaper weld wire to save money”
8. “Quit complaining – just weld the parts” (out of spec)
9. “Welding is simple – we don’t need experts: we have suppliers who need to earn their keep”
10. “Don’t worry – the customer hasn’t complained”

(OK, yes, those are actual quotes from production management staff.)

I’m sure you’ve heard some “whoppers” – please share them in the comments so we can all moan and laugh! (And we can send a link here when we hear a “brilliant” welding management strategy suggested.)

Turnkey Illusions – How to Avoid Pitfalls When Outsourcing Welding Automation

“You can easily purchase high-performance welding automation “turnkey” without needing in-house welding expertise, because the integrator is “the expert”.” Really? That’s a familiar idea. But is it true, or… is it just a manufacturing management myth?
It’s a MYTH.

Chances of success? Probably less than 10%. That’s how you purchase poor to mediocre welding automation performance, like most of your competition has, which usually produces small profit margins. Is that the solution that will REALLY help you survive and get stronger? If it’s seemed like every launch is a new Vegas gambling junket, you may not be far from the truth: 10% odds on bringing home a profit doesn’t sound very appealing. Still want to try it again?

Instead, why not try the rare “high-profit expertise” approach?  Let’s compare. In this valuable article I’ll cover:

• Three Foundational Welding Automation Principles.
• The Two Successful Paths to achieving high-performance welding automation.
• Three classic reasons that welding integration suppliers can rarely deliver world-class “turnkey” welding automation results.
• Five suggestions on how to pick an excellent welding automation designer/integrator and achieve great results.

You buy or create automation for two basic reasons:  to improve profit & quality, or because a customer demands it of you for those very reasons.  So why not be hugely successful at it?  Why not say goodbye to painful, lame launch results? Why not aspire to be so successful in manufacturing automation, that you trounce your competitors? Why shouldn’t one of your biggest challenges be developing strategies to hide how profitable your welding operations are from your nosy customers and envious competitors?

To be most successful in welding automation, the first two questions to ask are “what is our path to the best long-term profits, and what will it take to get us there?”  Because I have repeatedly achieved that in complex welding automation, and created cultures of effective Continuous Improvement, I have some solid answers for those questions. But to explain, I need to build the foundational principles – because they are invisible on the radar screen of most company management.

First, let’s realize a simple point: whatever the Pepsi machine says in the display window is how much it costs to get a bottle or can out of the machine.  If the goal is high-profitability, high-quality welding automation that gives you a competitive advantage, then there are some coins required to get there.  Don’t dare think you can save money by cutting critical “options” from the purchase order: that’s like watching a manager beating on the $1 Pepsi machine and demanding a drink for their customer when they only put in 75 cents. Don’t create such embarrassment… decide upfront to pay the price for success.

Instead of looking for ways to cheat the cost of success, which creates a high risk of project failure or tiny profits, look for low-cost opportunities to innovate and make the automation even more profitable than the proposal said it would be.

Poll – Biggest Obstacle to American Welding Excellence

Welding (or Materials Joining) Engineers, please vote on our latest poll, or view the results so far:

What do you think are the Top 2 biggest obstacles to welding excellence in American manufacturing, in the facilities you are personally familiar with?

(For Qualified Voters: Please, only vote if you are functionally experienced and/or titled and/or degreed as a welding or materials joining engineer, and have at least a Bachelor of Science degree in an Engineering discipline.  Everyone else, feel free to view the results.)

Remember to pick the Top Two obstacles!  [4/6/10 added two new choices to the bottom, by W.E. suggestion.]

See all of our Welding and Manufacturing Polls here.

Most Disruptive New Paradigm Technologies

What are the most powerful, the most disruptive new paradigm-shifting technologies for manufacturing?

That’s a harder question to answer than what people realize, and many people would answer it differently. I’m going to answer it myself in this article, slanted toward welding. But the biggest power of the question lies in the searching and the analysis, because ultimately that’s not the question that needs answered. The question that any leading company executive or engineering manager really needs to answer is this one:

“Which new paradigm-shifting technologies can I take full “disruptive” advantage of in my marketplace segment or new segments?”

Answering that question effectively requires research and analysis, as well as a keen visionary eye.  Because in evaluating a new technology for feasibility and disruptive profit potential, you must accurately envision what can realistically be, not what already is. Essentially, you must think innovatively.

Take for example, this recent article in Fabricating & Metalworking on Hybrid Laser Arc Welding (HLAW) as “the future of welding”, which leads off with this statement:
“This innovative technology is the most disruptive in a generation, leading some to believe hybrid laser arc welding will be a core welding process in the next five to ten years.”

Where Pulse Waveforms Meet Excellence

I thought that others might benefit from this Q&A on pulse GMAW welding.

Brian:

I have a cell that I am working on that has a pulse capable power supply.  It currently runs .035″ solid lincoln wire.

If I was to experiment with pulse, somewhere in the back of my mind I thought you always taught us to go up to .045″.  Is that correct or am I getting confused with some other application?

Thanks, N.

N –

Thanks for the question. You are correct.  This is the reason why various welding “experts” say that going to pulse causes a reduction in penetration that is often a problem. Going up one wire size is the “trick” that puts you back in the same ballpark on penetration, while gaining the benefits that pulse can bring – such as a longer arc length for lower spatter, spatter that is cooler and much less tenacious in adhering, and a different bead profile that often brings advantages.

Basic Variables of the Pulse Waveform

Now, once you’re in pulse, then the window of opportunity opens in terms of waveform selection/alteration to optimize your weld characteristics for most advantage. Some say that “a factory waveform is already optimized and pulse is pulse”. That’s the voice of ignorance.  The Pulse-GMAW process is the waveform, which produces specific results. Repeatability of the results hinges on the consistency of that waveform’s reproduction and stability.  Each and every waveform produces a unique balance in target criteria such as travel speed, deposition rate, resistance to burn-through, spatter production, out of position capability, fit-up gap variations, sidewall penetration, bead width/depth, etc.  Sure, the “factory waveform” was optimized, but probably not for your factory or specific application. Odds are that the “canned” waveform does not have the target balance you need to get highly optimized results like fast cycle times, zero rework, and no quality concerns.