With a focus on quality and providing a broad range of capabilities, Industrial Sales & Manufacturing uses LightWELD to save time, improve quality, and maximize resources.
What’s a Success Story?
There are a lot of reasons why our customers invest in LightWELD: it might solve a specific problem for them, or help them be more productive, or they might just be excited by the technology. Whatever the reason, we love talking to them and learning about their businesses.
Our success stories are a closer look at some of our customers, what they’re working on, and how LightWELD has helped them find success. We hope that their stories can help give you a better idea of how the industry is using and benefiting from LightWELD.
If you would like to be featured in a LightWELD success story, we’d love to hear from you. Just click here to get started.
About the Company
Industrial Sales and Manufacturing (ISM) is a family-owned company that prides itself on “all under one roof” manufacturing capabilities, including machining, fabrication, assembly, testing, and finishing. ISM has found success since 1963 by focusing on providing high-quality results for demanding customers across industries like transportation, mining, energy, medical, and agriculture.
At the heart of their operations is Charlie Rutkowski, Executive Vice President of Operations at ISM. According to Charlie, ISM embraces continuous improvement across all areas of the business, from investing in state-of-the-art equipment to building a culture that involves and values every employee.
Industry
Fabrication
Company Size
51-200
Location
Erie, Pennsylvania
“We were really happy with LightWELD so when LightWELD 2000 came out we said ‘OK, let’s buy it.'”
The Challenge
For ISM, improving their capabilities is a key part of their strategy to stay competitive without sacrificing quality. “We have to stay ahead of what our competitors are doing,” says Charlie, “we touch a lot of industries – if there is a technology that we can implement that can help, everybody has a hand in making it happen.”
ISM’s welding capabilities are nothing to sneeze at. At the time of writing the company has eight manual welding booths, four traditional MIG welding robots, and one MIG cobot system. Still, ISM had identified opportunities to improve weld quality, tackle tricky and time-consuming applications, and get more done.
The Solution
By the time we interviewed Charlie and his team, ISM had already invested in two LightWELD units two years ago and had just purchased a third. ISM’s welding team was very comfortable with the technology, even taking advantage of custom-defined LightWELD settings to maximize performance and quality.
As part of the company’s process, a Certified Welding Inspector regularly validates laser welds with on-site metrology capabilities to confirm that the weld quality is consistently superb. According to Charlie, “We were really happy with LightWELD so when LightWELD 2000 came out we said ‘OK, let’s buy it.’”
For ISM, LightWELD has been about more than just high-quality welds, however. The company is also benefiting from reduced post processing and clean-up.
“With LightWELD we don’t have to do any spatter cleanup or tweaking. We just weld the parts together, nothing moves, it’s awesome.'”
For a particularly challenging 14-gauge assembly, extensive prefab fit up and fixturing was required to minimize warping caused by arc welding methods. Even then, the part required additional tweaks to bring it up to spec.
According to Joe Tomasik, Process & Estimation Manager and Plant Engineer at ISM, LightWELD was able to save an impressive amount of time on this job. “With LightWELD, we don’t have to do any spatter cleanup or tweaking. We just weld the parts together, nothing moves, it’s awesome.”
LightWELD has helped ISM on the human resources side as well. According to Charlie, “Trying to find qualified welders is difficult and LightWELD helps fill the gap. You still need to find the right parameters and watch what you’re doing, but LightWELD really makes it a lot easier to get people back into manufacturing.”
Getting Started with LightWELD
ISM is just one of thousands of customers that have expanded their capabilities with LightWELD. All of us on the LightWELD team know that every operation is different. That’s why we’re here to help – whether you have questions about capabilities or safety or want to experience LightWELD before committing, we’re here to make getting started easy.
Click here to get started. We’ll take it from there.
