What if the laser head, power source, nozzle and other parts of your laser cutting machine didn’t work together? It won’t run, right?
Whether it is a laser cutting machine, metal bending press brake or a metal rolling machine – they won’t work until all their components are working at sync. Same goes for a metal fabrication shop.
The success of stainless steel fabrication, aluminium fabrication, or steel fabrication don’t depend on how expensive your machines are or how experienced each of your employees are, until they work as a team, your results will be “okay”, not “great”.
Yes, your teams do need the right tools and equipment to work with. However, if your team is dysfunctional as they don’t match in their working style, things will be complicated even with top-notch machinery at their disposal. This is clearly not a characteristic of an ideal team. Then what is?
An ideal team for a metal fabrication shop will be the one whose members complement each other’s skills and working style. I like to separate a fabrication process into 4 different parts.
- The design and instruction
2. Execution of the design
3. Evaluation of the product
4. Packaging and Delivery
For example, say Bruce is the creative engineer for your fabrication shop. His work is to design and develop the basic layout of a product. Then there is Clark who is responsible for all types of machine works. Let Victor be your quality assurance guy who excels in details and knows what’s wrong with your production. And lastly, you’ll need a packaging and delivery manager who is Barry.
Here, Bruce is the team leader of your crew with the quality of directing the regular workflow. For quality maintenance, Victor is there with his analysis and evaluation skills. Clark and Barry have their own sectors that require fabricating, packaging and delivering the products, which is the core of a shop. See how balanced this team is?
An Ideal team should be just that. There needs to be a group of people or a specific individual to sort the work out for other employees and plan everything. Then your shop needs a group of experienced and skilled operators who will listen to your product designer and follow his instruction to deliver what’s needed. Once the product is finished and brought down from the machine, it should go to the quality assurance department where the work of your operators will be checked. Lastly, when the products get a green signal from the evaluation team, it goes to the packaging section where it is prepared for delivery. This is how a team in a metal fabrication shop should work.
When they work together and sync with each other’s work style and preferences, the final product turns out to be better than what you’ve expected. For that, it’s important that they understand each other’s works and why their own work is import to the person in next and vice versa.