Engineering efficient customer solutions

At Macsteel VRN we believe that to grow our business, we need to grow with our customers and in this economic climate this can only come about as the result of the relentless Pursuit of Reinvention… innovating on our processes and systems to empower our customers, the fabricators.

To achieve this, we have invested in technology, people, training and support services. We now make use of numerically controlled machinery, CAD programmes and a fully integrated drawing office to provide cost-effective and integrated solutions for our customers. We engineer our customers’ success by aligning people, products and technology.

In the past, fabricators believed that backward integration in processing of flat steel by cutting, bending, rolling etc., was essential, because they thought our services were expensive and that by controlling all processing in-house, they could control the cost of the entire process better.

Many fabricators process their own plates and use part of the plate as needed. A lot of these plates, at various customer premises are left partially unused, resulting in inefficiency, creating unnecessary scrap and stockholding. Our processes create efficiency across the board, for all our customers.

By implementing our fully integrated Enterprise Resource Planning and Material Requirement Planning processes, our system now relies on time spent, to determine the cost of production. In this way the exact cost of each item can be determined, and the cost benefit from better efficiency is passed back to our customers. This innovation has also paved the way for nesting orders, where a single sheet of plate can be utilised for multiple jobs and multiple customers, saving the company time and the customer money.

A simple analysis of the cost and efficiency of the supply chain shows that using a fully integrated and streamlined service centre such a Macsteel VRN, is a more sensible business approach for fabricators due to better optimisation of larger plates between different customers with the same material requirement and our ability to support the manufacturing process cost-effectively.