Page 25 - MetalForming magazine • December 2022
P. 25

  FABRICATION
 SOUTH CAROLINA METAL FABRICATOR TACKLES
Welder Shortage with Cobots
Since the initial test drive with its first cobot welder, Advanta Southeast has purchased three more cobot welders (two shown here), as well as two welding cobots for its 140,000-sq.-ft. headquarters facility in Peters- burg, MI. While Advanta South-
          Weld-shop productivity jumps 400 percent with the addition of welding cobots to this South Carolina metal fabricator, helping the company attract new business previously out of reach.
 For several years, metal fabricators have been dealing with an ever- increasing labor shortage for welders—new and experienced. Young people don’t seem to be attracted to the work, and veteran welders continue to nudge closer to retirement age. And, there remains competition to attract and retain the skilled welders still on the market, driving up salaries and associated costs.
The result? Despite unprecedented demand from domestic manufacturers, many metal fabricators across North America have had to reduce production capacity.
Stiff Competition to Hire Welders in a Post-Pandemic World
Case in point: Advanta Southeast
LLC, Manning, SC, a division of Advan- ta Industries, specialist in manufac- turing returnable racks and dunnage, and provider of turnkey industrial metal fabrication for several sectors, including defense, automotive, energy and marine. The firm recently faced the same staffing issues many in the industry face: a lack of welders exac- erbated by the global pandemic, which hit the company hard, according to plant manager Mark Moye.
“In addition to COVID, we started seeing an increase in fabrication com- panies moving here to the Southeast United States,” he says. “So, the market share of labor is pretty tight.”
The South Carolina facility encom- passes 79,000 sq. ft. and offers sheet and tube laser cutting, forming and
machining, in addition to welding. And, as many metal fabricators can attest, legacy equipment still is rampant in shops. While others have switched to traditional welding robots in the hopes of mitigating the limited number of welders, the Advanta Southeast man- agement team remained unsure about implementing conventional robots for welding. Of concern: long lead times to get the equipment shipped out, the extensive training required for welding personnel and, to top it off, the sheer complexity of programming and trou- bleshooting the machines for each job.
In other words, company manage- ment wondered just how much a tra- ditional robot would actually acceler- ate throughput and ensure weld consistency and quality, with so much
22 MetalForming/December 2022
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east plant manager Mark Moye admits initial pushback from the plant’s welders, they soon real- ized how simple the cobot was to use, and that it made their work easier.
 

















































































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