Rolling to market/Part I: Cutting lead-times with on-site roll forming

摘要

Walk onto the shop floor of some roll forming facilities, particularly those serving the metal-building sector, and you might see plenty of work going on after the roll form line, with personnel loading huge parts into specially built wooden crates. Meanwhile the roll former itself sits idle. The result: The production floor can look more like a wood shop than a metal fabrication facility. For many jobs, the toughest part isn't roll forming the parts themselves-it's getting those parts to the customer. Consider standing-seam panels that are designed to mechanically snap and lock with other panels, a material of choice for metal-building contractors. Some may have ribs, others striations, but all are designed for ease of assembly in mind. However, they certainly weren't designed for easy transportation. Parts are cut to length, then placed on immense wooden frames in such a way that allows the maximum load on a truck. That's a lot of material handling. True, shops gain more efficiency through better packaging and smarter transportation logistics, but they can take those efficiencies only so far. Trucks can take panels that are only so long (about 53 feet), and they can drive only so fast to get to the site.