The following video highlights a significant competitive advantage in the fastening equipment industry by addressing common customer pain points related to maintenance and operational downtime.
While competitors' machines often suffer from frequent jams and labor-intensive repairs that can require a toolmaker and take up to 10 minutes for a simple bit change, Mike Rabasco, President and CEO, demonstrates how WEBER's unique designs allow for maintenance—such as changing a bit or pulling a feed tube—to be performed in under 7 seconds without the need for specialized tools.
This efficiency is critical for customers managing large fleets of equipment, as the ability to perform general maintenance quickly significantly reduces cumulative downtime and serves as a major incentive for choosing their brand.
To put it simply, struggling with poorly designed equipment is like owning a car that requires you to remove the entire engine just to access the filter for a routine oil change.
There's a list of common things that we hear from our customers and their experience with fastening equipment, other brands of screwdrivers that continue to come up, and a lot of that is maintenance. How to do the maintenance, how often they have to be maintained, how often they jam, when they do jam - what you have to do to unjam them, and so forth.
It's part of life. It's what we hear. What's interesting is that we've actually taken all of those things that we've heard, and we have a workaround for all of them.
This just happened. I was there with the customer, and I was looking at another brand’s screwdriver. I'm like, “How do you change the bit in this thing”? And he said, "This thing is… there's one guy that is okay at it. It takes him 10 minutes".
That day, we did a demo of our equipment, and our equipment comes apart so quickly. I think in under 7 seconds, I had the system apart and back together again. And he was like, "That's it. That's all we're buying from now on". It was a big pain point for him, the downtime of just changing a bit. Can you imagine - if you had to spend 500 hours to get an oil change because they had to take the engine out to pull the oil filter out? It's a bit like that.
So, the things that you have to do regularly, maybe pull the feed tube out of the head, or pull the head off the equipment, or pull the bit out, or change the nose piece. These are things that I mean, not just with us, but with anyone; they are just things you have to maintain. They're things you really should take apart rather quickly. And what we've done is we've actually developed products and have some very unique designs for that. So that you can do general maintenance very, very quickly on them. And sometimes, just that's worth the price of admission.
You have to think if a customer has 50 screwdrivers and it takes them 10 minutes to change the bit on each one of them, and they have to change them once every few days, or once a week, or once every two weeks. That's a lot of downtime. If you can have something real quick to maintain, and really easy to maintain, and everyone can do it, and you don't need tools, that's a huge advantage.
What may seem like a minor design detail can quickly become a major production bottleneck. By engineering fastening systems that are easy to service and fast to maintain, WEBER eliminates one of the most common—and costly—sources of downtime. Reach out if you'd like to find solutions for your assembly automation pain points!