Walk through Inland Metal Technologies, and you’ll see precision sheet metal automation on full display: a punch/laser combo with automated part removal, an automatic tool change brake with sheet followers; robotic welding cells; the works. Thing is, this isn’t Illinois, Georgia, or Wisconsin. It’s in Hayward, Calif., in the heart of the Bay Area, one of the most expensive places to live in the country.
Apple’s space-age headquarters sits less than an hour away in Cupertino; Googlers work in nearby Mountain View. Tech workers demand, and receive, extraordinarily high salaries, which in turn boosts the cost of real estate. Most manufacturers have moved to far-out suburbs or, for that matter, other areas of the country—but not Inland. Despite its name, the custom fabricator has not moved inland.
Inland has been in its current location since the early 1990s and has no plans on moving. Why? According to Martin Sullivan, COO, the answer has to do with Inland’s business model, customer mix, and approach to metal fabrication technology and automation.
“The short answer is, we go up market. The big costs are labor and real estate,” Sullivan said, “and so, we minimize their impact by doing harder work. Easy and less critical work can be done in a cheaper area, but it’d be difficult to replicate our capabilities anywhere else.”
Automation, Margins, and the Value of Labor
Sullivan emphasized that minimizing the impact of labor doesn’t mean automating all manual processes away. To the contrary, work that’s easily automated likely wouldn’t make business sense in such a high-cost area, at least in the precision sheet metal sector. Such automation often requires a lot of space. Jobs that are easily automated often end up having lower gross margins, especially as more shops adopt a particular technology. That in turn drives up the impact of labor. Yes, labor costs might be minimal, but the little labor costs that remain can make the difference between a job making or losing money.
The trick is to automate difficult jobs that few competitors are willing to tackle. To illustrate, he pointed to the company’s robotic welding cells and vast collection of weld fixtures. Conventional wisdom states that a job needs a certain level of volume to weld robotically. He pointed to an operator placing components into a fixture design with laser-cut components alongside the typical toggle clamps and stops.
Pour lire l'article complet : Metal fabrication in Big Tech’s backyard (thefabricator.com)
