These fabricators represent a minority of steel fabrication companies. Companies are generally large and organized by department: administration, sales, purchasing, design, production, etc.
They fabricate transmission towers for markets such as electricity and telecommunications.
Manufacturers of transmission towers generally control the process from A to Z: they don't outsource their modeling, as they themselves have catalogs of standard towers on which they make the necessary modifications for a given site. Consequently, their production management software needs to take into account the manufacture of catalog-type towers in order to optimize the production of standardized projects.
Since the vast majority of towers are galvanized, fabricators generally have in-house galvanizing units to rationalize costs and avoid the need for subcontracting, especially for these large volumes.
Transmission towers are generally fairly simple to model, and are designed to withstand wind loads, storms and environmental stresses, and in some cases must withstand extreme conditions such as ice loads in colder climates.
Standardization is much more common than in other sectors of steel fabrication. In fact, fabricators have catalogs of standard towers that they can adapt as required.
Towers are essentially made of bolted-together angles and plates, and are therefore lighter than other types of steel structure.
Traceability standards are not widespread on this type of construction, as they generally represent little risk. On the other hand, high organizational skills are required for this type of construction, as it is made up of a large number of parts, often similar to the naked eye. Builders must therefore ensure that parts are well sorted for easy retrieval, to avoid production delays due to missing parts.
These fabricators produce structures that are relatively simple to build, with low margins, which means they need to generate high volumes in order to make a profit. In this sense, optimizing the fabrication shop floor is crucial for them.
First of all, the link with the detaling office needs to be optimized: it's important to retrieve as much information as possible on the elements to be produced from the modeling software, to avoid unnecessary double entries that sometimes involve human error. However, this factor is less prevalent than in other sectors of steel construction, due to the possibility of standardizing work for transmission towers.
Parts imported into the production management software can be checked automatically to ensure that there are no unfeasible (in terms of workshop capacity) or non-compliant parts to produce.
Furthermore, fabricators need to optimize their use of steel by methodically organizing their stock and purchasing management: buying enough to achieve economies of scale when purchasing, and ensuring that they have the stocks they need for the day's production, while taking care that these fixed assets don't cost them too much money or take up too much space on their production sites.
In addition, the use of raw materials needs to be optimized with section nesting and plate nesting algorithms to ensure that as little material as possible is wasted, especially given the unpredictable rise in steel prices in recent years.
In addition, processing (punching, shearing, sawing, drilling, milling, marking, scribing, etc.) must be automated on reliable CNC machines, and controlled by production management software to ensure smooth, advanced, error-free programming and automatic progress monitoring. The software must also enable upstream management of machining technologies to optimize work on the machines. For example, it's better to choose shearing rather than sawing, or punching rather than drilling, as these machining operations are possible on angle bars used to manufacture transmission towers.
Manual jobs such as tacking, welding and painting are not as common as in other sectors of steel fabrication.
Shipments are a point of vigilance, as the number of parts to be loaded is very large, and an oversight can cost money and delays on the worksite. It's important to prepare them meticulously and easily, with a tablet connected to the production management software, for example, directly in front of the trucks.
Last but not least, production management software must be able to visualize a variety of performance indicators, so that manufacturers can check the profitability of their workshop, employees, projects, etc., over defined periods.