Tube 2022: Innovation, will to beat market forces are common themes in Düsseldorf

Augmented reality took center stage for companies like Metronor at Tube 2022. Images: Lincoln Brunner

Rudyard Kipling called disaster an impostor—a monster with no real menace. And if attendance at Tube 2022 in Düsseldorf, Germany, were any indication, the companies represented there would assuredly say the same.

After a four-year hiatus, Tube 2022 drew thousands of attendees to some 40,000 sq. m (more than 430,000 sq. ft.) of exhibit space from June 20-24 at the Düsseldorf Exhibition Centre. More than 760 exhibitors showcased their services and technologies at the show, which ran concurrently with wire 2022 in the exhibition halls adjacent to the Tube show.

While every company represented at Tube 2022 came with their pet set of aims and concerns, several common themes and some exciting technological innovations arose throughout the week.

Augmented Reality Is for Real

Not long ago, augmented reality (AR) was firmly ensconced in games and daydreams. Today, forward-thinking companies are putting AR at the forefront of their product and service propositions, offering customers next-generation capabilities for such everyday necessities as machine servicing and pipe design.

Remote Servicing. One of the many companies offering remote servicing capabilities at the show was Inductotherm, parent company of tube industry mainstays Thermatool and Alpha and others.

With this service package, which Inductotherm offers on a subscription basis, customers can connect to a service technician or engineer and work with them remotely to troubleshoot a problem from virtually anywhere. By using AR-equipped goggles, customers and technicians can work, hundreds or even thousands of miles apart, as if they were standing on the same shop floor. In real time, they both can view the same machinery, drawings, reports, specifications, or whatever other data they need to spot, and fix the problem at hand.

Inductotherm recently launched the service, which already has about 10 subscribers.

“I think it’s a great way to connect people—you're really in the plant, even if you can’t be in the plant,” said Jake Civitello, sales associate at Thermatool. His colleague, Inductotherm Sales Manager Tom Postins, agreed.

“It’s a way of putting decades of Thermatool knowledge into your own head,” Postins said.

A representative of T-Drill demonstrates his company's capabilities at Tube 2022.

On-site Design. For most applications, measuring the space that a pipe needs to fill is as easy as pulling out a blueprint, spec sheet, or just a tape measure.

However, for particularly tight spaces (such as inside a submarine) where the only known variables are the location of the two ends, designing a pipe that will actually fit the allotted space is a bit more daunting. And that’s where the new AR functionality in Metronor’s TeZetCAD software comes in.

Using a camera to locate the two endpoints, Metronor’s software can design and construct a virtual pipe on-screen as a user is viewing the empty space in question. The software then determines the exact specifications using the coordinates recorded by the camera, cutting the chances of bending and cutting a bad pipe to virtually zero.

“It provides an easy way for programmers and operators to minimize production errors since, by visualizing the virtual pipes being built in the live environment, physical obstacles can be avoided before production even begins,” said Mariano Marks, sales executive at Metronor’s office in Rockford, Ill. “This ensures the perfect fit the first time, minimizing time, costs, and energy throughout the production process.”

Battling the Beast

On the challenge side, the witch’s brew of supply chain choke points, war in Ukraine, erratic steel pricing and supply, and the seemingly ubiquitous labor shortage has given nearly every manufacturer on the planet cause for alarm and reconsideration.

The companies represented at Tube 2022 were no exception. From steel tube makers to machine tool manufacturers, all were (and are) feeling the sting of a multiheaded monster that has forced them into ever more careful planning and execution of their strategies.

“You have two different issues,” said Frederic Delmas, CEO of Delmas Tubes, Barcelona, Spain. “The first issue is about price, so you need to plan accurately. But you have the other, which is the volatility of the background [situation]; so, what is today maybe is not tomorrow. One is going against the other. So, you have to play with this and try to balance the situation and make decisions—and quickly, because you can have big damage on your P&L (profit and loss) with a bad decision.”

The trouble for many companies comes not in the decisions they make themselves, but in the ones that the market makes for (and against) them in the form of supply chain bottlenecks.

Just ask Burkhard Stuff, head of proposals for Asmag Group company Seuthe, a manufacturer of precision roll forming equipment. For certain machines, Seuthe has had to quote delivery times of two years—not because Seuthe can’t make it faster than that, but because they’re having to wait one full year for electrical cabinets. An incomplete cabinet from a well-known controls systems manufacturer arrived recently at Seuthe’s shop with the bold headline, “Warning—delivery variances (missing items).” It read, in part:

“This equipment is not complete because of missing items. Details of the missing items are listed in [the] delivery schedule attached to the delivery note. We will send the missing parts to site a.s.a.p.”

Stuff was more direct about the situation.

“When we prepare a quote for a customer and we say, ‘Delivery time for the machine is 24 months,’ what will the customer say to me? ‘You are joking.’ But it’s not a joke,” Stuff said. “Actually, the lead time for electrical cabinets is 12 months.

“And what shall we do, especially in regard to pricing?” he said. “The price goes up every day, every week, every month. Shall I go to the customer and say, ‘Hey customer, I need a little bit more money?’ What shall we do? It’s unbelievable; incredible.”

In the meantime, Seuthe and other companies continue to take orders and build machinery as quickly as they can because customer demand is increasing. Ashley Webb, president of Vulcan Tool, Dayton, Ohio, said that while lead times for his stand-alone (and admittedly simpler) tube cutting machines aren't nearly two years, his company also has encountered a significant increase in leads times for control systems.

“We do have some suppliers that even up until a few months ago were giving us good lead times for some controls components, and now all of a sudden those are being stretched far out,” said Webb, who was exhibiting at Tube 2022 for the first time. “We have one supplier in particular that can’t actually give us delivery dates. “We’re seeing folks who have had inquiries put in with us a year or more ago start to come back and ask, ‘Can we get an updated quote?’ Actually, very few ask if the quote’s still good because they all know that everything’s being inflated—labor costs are being inflated, material costs are inflated.”

If you’re going to survive in a market throwing so many variables your way at once, flexibility is the order of the day. And if you’re able to offer your customer a way to flex with the needs of their customers as well, all the better.

"Everything has changed a lot, very quickly, and this has given a lot of new opportunities,” said Maurizio Toselli, sales director for BLM Group, Cantù, Italy. “Quantities are going down, batches are going down, and we are very much oriented in this direction. We do not do [machines] that do millions of parts and always the same. We make flexible machines in bending and tube lasers and sheet metal lasers, so people who have to launch new products use our machines. They can be customized.

“The answer I hear when I ask [customers], ‘How is the situation, do you have work?’ They say, ‘For the moment, a lot.’ Now, due to COVID, due to the war, due to the cost of energy and the cost of material, everyone says, ‘We have to see what will happen.’ I think we as the western part of the world, we felt that the world was stable—this was the situation for always. In a couple of years, we have discovered that everything can change very quickly, even into a dramatic situation. And so, everyone says, ‘OK, it’s very good for our orders, but we have to see.’”