In the Lean philosophy, we know that it is important to adapt production to the customer requests and that retooling on a line needs to be completed in minutes, not hours.

For roll forming, the set-up time of a line was traditionally a very time-consuming operation, in which rollers were changed one by one at each station (and had to be positioned accurately and adjusted individually). For some machines, this could literally take days and require highly skilled engineers.

Can any company afford this kind of downtime nowadays?

When you find yourself having to decide between different production systems or when management has given you the responsibility to make this decision, you undoubtedly ask yourself the following question: what if I make the wrong investment?

Over the past few years, we have seen a major increase in the cost of raw materials, such as hot-rolled coils, which have increased by more than 41%.
Such increases make financial planning, inventory cost assessment and so on very difficult.
In addition, if the cost of base material increases, margins shrink.
Increasingly, we are being approached by companies to investigate ways of making sheet metal products, saving material, while maintaining and very often increasing product quality and performance.
Learning to manufacture with thinner materials, today, becomes-not just a necessity-but a real opportunity!

The data is very interesting: in Italy, three out of four companies that had moved production abroad are moving production back into the country If we add the fact that 80% of multinationals have already drawn up plans to move production back into the country it becomes obvious that what we are witnessing is an extremely important, noteworthy phenomenon

When I first started hearing about Industry 4.0 in 2013, I must admit that I didn't understand much about it.
That is precisely why I started to read up on it and fixate on the concepts that lead to evolving a company from the artisanal and master model, to a true industry of the future.

What more could there possibly be to say about the world of sheet metal working that is so interesting?

The difficulty of finding productive personnel, especially in Europe and North America, is becoming an increasingly widespread problem.

This is accompanied by the desire to contain production costs as much as possible, replacing the personnel assigned to simple or repetitive operations with automations.

The forbidden dream of entrepreneurs and companies is to produce with very little or no staff.

The SMED philosophy, which is an instrument of Lean Production, is the goal of perfection towards which you can strive, even over time, adding Combi groups and equipment in order to increasingly simplify and speed-up tool changeovers - as long as the machine has been conceived and designed with this in mind.

Bito Lagertechnik Bittmann GmbH is one of the European leaders in storage systems.
We process around 70,000 tons of steel sheets per year.
In this case, our goal was to improve our ability to produce small batches, special pieces, prototypes and samples, to satisfy the great demand for flexibility and to produce special pieces based on specific customer requests.
In this case, our goal was to improve our ability to produce small batches, special pieces, prototypes and samples,to satisfy the great demand for flexibility and to produce special pieces based on specific customer requests.
However, we wanted to combine high flexibility with good productivity levels.
So an important question arose again and again during investment planning: production from sheet or from coil?