Formetal Technology is not always working with a rigid rule, but the company’s experience helps customers make important decisions justifying the migration to outsource roll forming vs. in-house brake forming. Press braking has – and will always have – its place in the forming of metal products. However, as soon as a customer is faced with high volume production, is in need of more complex profiles or is seeking to explore more cost-effective processing options, outsourcing production to custom roll formers becomes a viable option.
“For anyone producing an extremely low volume of product, press braking is feasible. As soon as you require a shorter lead time, a higher volume, improved efficiency and a competitive cost structure to better compete within your market, altering their product portfolio to a roll form process and outsourcing production to a custom roll former makes sense.
Anyone who has operated a press brake can complain about its the limitations and low efficiency.
Brake Press material must be slit and cut to length prior to forming any profile, whereas with roll forming, material is fed by coil … reducing the cost of material handling and improving overall equipment runtime efficiency. This could be the biggest different between press brake and roll forming.
In addition, high yield strength (hardness) materials are also very difficult even impossible to process through a press brake process due to the challenge in controlling springback. Roll forming does not present this type of material limitation as high yield material springback can be controlled easily through the design of Formetal’s roll forming tools.
Volume
Production efficiency, resource utilization, and Overall Equipment Effectiveness are the standard key performance indicators that measure an organization's manufacturing success. To ensure operational peak performance is achieved when high volume is demanded, essential processes require increased scrutiny.
What may have worked for Low Volume/Short Runs (Press Braking) will not work for High Volume/Long Runs (Roll Forming). Due to the nature of the press brake process (each bend requiring a single feed), increased cycle time and excess labor all lend to decreased efficiencies and overall poor performance when faced with high volume customer demands. There are no constraints within a linear roll form process as the finished product is completed in a single pass thus maximizing your equipment efficiency and filtering the savings directly to your customer. The faster you can get product out the door, the faster you can improve cashflow.
With the fast development of metal processing and roll forming technology, roll forming machine is going to replace press braking more and more, because there are some many advantages in roll forming, higher working efficiency, higher profiling accuracy, stronger applicability, less labor cost, safer…
