The Steel Market Update (SMU) Summit in Atlanta drew professionals from cross the steel mill, service center business, and metal manufacturing business. Think about the day of someone in a metal fabricator’s front office. A salesperson or estimator opens an email inbox to find all sorts of messages from customers. They address request for quotes (RFQs), change orders, maybe reply to questions asked days (or, alas, weeks) before. Some might be on the phone, calling customers for clarification about this or that spec on a drawing, or perhaps arrange or confirm a new delivery date. Messy desks might be full of spreadsheet printouts. Walk out to the receiving dock. Someone with a clipboard, perhaps an iPad and a scanner, stands there to log in all the material coming in the door. The plant might be extraordinarily automated, full of robotics, but what about all those manual keystrokes? On Monday, at the Steel Market Update (SMU) Summit in Atlanta, Mustafa Zafar, director of global transformation at Kloeckner Metals , Americas, described a different reality. The metal service center, which also offers fabrication services, has special scanning devices that trucks drives past on their way to receiving. They detect Bluetooth tags […]
Click here to view original web page at www.thefabricator.com
