Outstanding problems faced by the sheet metal manufacturing industry
Problems with the entire supply chain. The client's choice of supplier is generally based on three factors: finished product, quality, and delivery time. The relative proportion of sheet metal manufacturing companies' products involving after-sales service is still relatively small. At the same time, the size of customers is generally distinguished by the size of the order. Although the size and scale of the customer itself can also be divided, it is still recommended to classify them by order size and customer growth trend. For example, the problem of prepayment of materials, the problem of transferring customer inventory to suppliers, etc., these phenomena have gradually become common, and the only way to resolve them is for the sheet metal company itself to have good assets, have rapid response capabilities and establish its own advantageous supply chain.
Common problems on the supplier side. For sheet metal manufacturing companies, the main problem is insufficient capacity. The price of most sheet metal products does not have an absolute advantage, or the management level and enterprise scale of most sheet metal manufacturing companies are uneven, but generally lower than that of customers. Therefore, most sheet metal manufacturing companies' own next-level suppliers often have less comprehensive capabilities than themselves. These actual situations have brought considerable costs to sheet metal manufacturing companies, increased the instability of factors such as product delivery time and quality, and additional management costs.
The problem of labor shortage. This talent shortage is not only reflected in technical labor, but also in the relatively low quality of management workers, which is also a bottleneck restricting the development of sheet metal manufacturing companies. Vocational education has not cultivated the talents needed by factories, and young people are reluctant to enter factories. The fundamental reason is the trade-off between input and remuneration. Now students from technical schools have skill appraisals, but most of them have little practical ability. The content of vocational education training is out of touch with the needs of factories; most factories do not have a working environment and labor remuneration that attracts young people. The entire sheet metal manufacturing industry started late, the technology is simple, and it has not received attention from colleges and universities and research institutes. At present, there are no professional colleges to systematically train technical workers and high-skilled personnel for this industry. The management of this industry also has its unique characteristics. The professional management of enterprises and the shortage of technicians have caused a series of problems.
Tight cash flow and insufficient R&D investment. Most sheet metal manufacturing companies are still in the OEM model, relying on processing fees to make profits, rather than developing products to establish their own brands. Sheet metal manufacturing companies do not have enough say in the upstream and downstream industrial chains. Upstream steel plate companies need cash transactions, and downstream customers need payment cycles, which causes tight cash flow in their own companies and not enough funds to invest in R&D.
Product data flow cannot interact accurately between production companies and customers. The drawings of customer orders received by manufacturing companies are all paper three-view drawings, which are generated by 3D software. Customers are unwilling to hand over 3D models to downstream production supporting companies for reasons such as technical confidentiality. Manufacturing companies need to use the three-view drawing to deduce the 3D model through human brain reverse guidance, or split it into multiple separate parts to complete the cutting, and then weld and assemble it according to their own reverse guidance three-view drawing. The problem of inaccurate reverse guidance graphics is often encountered, and a large number of errors lead to errors in part processing and assembly, which greatly reduces the production efficiency of the company, wastes a lot of manpower and material resources, and increases costs invisibly.
Information/automation upgrade and transformation. After the test of the epidemic in 2020, the shortage of human resources in the industry is unstable, and more and more corporate managers have clearly felt the urgency of information and automation transformation. If you want to do information and automation transformation, you need to invest money, have the support of technical management personnel with matching capabilities, have professional knowledge reserves, and other conditions and prerequisites, but the current difficulty is precisely that most sheet metal manufacturing companies do not have these conditions.
At present, the biggest bottleneck encountered by sheet metal parts companies is quality issues. Traditional sheet metal inspection technology is to transmit design dimension information to process equipment and product parts in the form of analog quantities such as mold lines and templates. With the application of digital technology, sheet metal products gradually convert analog quantities into digital quantities from design and process. The measured data is compared and analyzed with the theoretical three-dimensional solid model through digital measuring equipment. The value transfer is accurate and the detection work is efficient. Due to the reduction of a large number of tooling and samples, the manufacturing cost is greatly reduced.
The digital design and manufacturing of sheet metal parts have brought huge technical development space for sheet metal digital detection technology. Only digital detection technology can truly assist sheet metal digital manufacturing to mature.
