New Trend in Tube & Pipe and Roll Forming Seminars: Plant Consolidation

This tooling manufacturer explains why consolidating services to save costs is paramount in industry today.

Roll-Kraft (Mentor, OH), a leading producer of tooling for the tube and pipe and roll forming industries, conducts numerous training seminars throughout the country. Recently a new trend has emerged as companies look to decrease training costs and improve efficiencies.

According to Robert Sladky, the vice president of tube mill engineering, andBret Molnar, a senior technical advisor for Roll-Kraft, “We are seeing a new trend in conducting seminars. More firms with multiple plants are consolidating their training programs and combining the attendees from multiple plants for their in-house seminars.” This not only expedites the training of entire teams of personnel, but saves the costs involved in having individual seminars for each plant and is, by far, the most efficient plan for these companies.

Such was the case recently for two major Roll-Kraft tube and pipe customers located in the east and in the southern part of the U.S. Each manufacturer has multiple plants running smaller mechanical tube mills, as well as larger pipe mills. Management from each location got together and scheduled back-to-back weeks of programs at key locations that allowed them to split up the attendees from their various plants and still keep production running on their mills.

This consolidation process has proven to be very successful, and future programs are planned during 2012. Other firms without multiple locations simply schedule the mills to be down for a single day for their in-house training. One plant manager stated, “In the past we always made the excuse that we couldn’t shut down the mills to conduct training and kept putting it off. But the real fact of the matter is that we can’t afford not to. It is just a matter of scheduling and preplanning. We are very glad we took the time for this training.”

The key areas covered in the programs are mill integrity, alignment, tooling design, setup, tooling maintenance, and developing a standard for all to follow. Attendees are invited to given their comments on the training session. www.roll-kraft.com