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Cody Lee from Everyday Technologies and Lance Thrailkill from All Metals Fabricating join the Next-Gen Metal Fab and Tim Heston as new co-hosts with Caleb Chamberlain from OSH Cut. This discussion touches on the history and evolution of their businesses, the role of automation and software in improving efficiency and productivity, and the various models and trends emerging in the metal manufacturing industry.

I just used an AI agent to write a custom app for my shop. It took less than two hours.

I believe that manufacturing is perfectly illustrative of how markets are supposed to work. For starters, customers have options. Lots of them. There are tens of thousands of manufacturers in the United States, spanning hundreds of industries, and serving millions of people and companies. Customers have a lot of mobility and power. If my company starts shipping poor-quality products or charging too much, my customers can just go elsewhere. That’s as it should be.

Service centers can’t do every kind of work, but large jobs requiring relatively simple value-added services are an easy win. They command enough scale to earn direct-to-mill buying power and can therefore drive prices down far enough to win the big jobs. We need those kinds of efficiencies to help reduce manufacturing costs in the U.S.

Just because you can draw it in CAD doesn’t mean you can make it. Columnist Caleb Chamberlain imagines a world where this isn’t the case.

When you charge more for rush orders, what happens when you shorten standard lead times? No surprise, fewer people pay for faster delivery, but there’s a big upside.