When you're in business creating products, welding process profitability may seem like a vague concept. But welding operation costs can cause direct impacts on your profitability. Which area of welding causes the highest change in your bottom line? Learn which one has the strongest impact here.

What part of the welding process most affects the bottom line?

Here are some of the profit impacts of welding operations:

• Deposition rate of electrode wire: How much of your weld material is actually ending up in the weld and how much of it is being wasted? If you can determine your cost per foot of weld, you should be able to find this figure. Are you recycling the scrap that is being tossed out of the weld to regain some of your lost material? If you feel that the percentage of the wire being deposited is too low, you may want to take a closer look at your supplier. Is the wire of high quality or is it simply acceptable?
• Problems in the gas lines: If your gas lines are having problems, it can really affect your profitability. Are they clogged? If they are, you may be getting messy welds with a lot of spatter. If they're leaking, you're wasting a lot of gas that should be focused at the weld site. In either example, you're wasting money. Leaking gas is wasting your materials. If your lines are okay, there could be contamination in the gas. This can cause problems with porosity in your welds, causing them to fail prematurely.
• Are your welding machines making the grade? If you regularly have rejected welds due to poor quality or because the machine is at the edge of its engineered range of operation, you may be spending a lot of time having metal re-welded, requiring excessive cleanup and re-prepping the weld joint before the metal can be put through the process again. If you’re experiencing weld spatter adhering to the work piece, or simply losing to much weld metal in the form of spatter, then you’re losing money in additional labor and consumables for cleanup. Besides, why should you remove part of what you worked so hard to apply? You'll see much better results by upgrading your machinery to handle a higher range of performance than to continue pushing borderline equipment. New high quality welding equipment can pay for itself extremely fast if you’re dealing with these issues.

By being aware of these areas that can quickly affect your profitability, you can improve your operation's efficiency while building better profitability into your entire company. If you need to make upgrades to improve your bottom line, please feel free to contact the experts at our offices today. And be sure to ask for a FREE copy of our “Weld Cost Analysis Program”. It’s an easy to use excel sheet that summarizes you’re welding cost while identifying the ones with the most impact. At OTC Daihen, we've been committed to cutting edge welding technology for nearly a century.