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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.

Ignoring deficit spending and tariffs, manufacturing is still poised for dramatic macro change over the next decade. Manufacturing also will remain relatively insulated from AI-driven disruption for the foreseeable future.

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.

The FABRICATOR welcomes its new columnist, Caleb Chamberlain, CEO and co-founder of OSH Cut, a fab shop that, with automated quoting and order processing, exemplifies the metal manufacturing industry’s push toward digitization.

OSH Cut offers automated quoting for flat sheet cutting and bending. The fabricator now is diving into near-instant quoting for laser tube cutting.

Balancing nesting efficiency against limited work-in-process (WIP) is an ongoing challenge for OSH Cut, a high-mix, on-demand sheet metal manufacturing service. So it developed in-house software that balances nesting efficiency against production needs.