Benjamin Steel Co., Inc., understands that future success in the steel service center business is based on the ability to provide value-added processing. The company has been saw-cutting and shearing, and oxy-fuel and plasma cutting carbon-based plates, sheet, shapes, hot-roll and cold-drawn bars, grating, pipe and tubing products for decades.

Founded in 1935 as Demana Iron, the company purchased Benjamin Iron and Metal Company in 1969 and changed the name of the combined companies to Benjamin Steel a year later. It is headquartered in Springfield, Ohio, with branch locations in Dayton, Lima and Mansfield.  The company has 220 employees, 75 at the Springfield headquarters where it operates a Mazak Optonics FabriGear 150 3D laser cutting system. Benjamin Steel brings in approximately $80 million in annual sales. The company believes its competitive edge is its unquestioned commitment to customer satisfaction.

Company president Nick Demana says the FabriGear is making customer satisfaction easier, and also is resulting in increased processing sales, increased material sales and the addition of informal customer design work.

Prior to the addition of the FabriGear in April 2006, Benjamin Steel simply saw-cut tubes to length and delivered them to customers. “Now, we literally can make parts,” Demana says. “The advantage of the machine is that it can essentially replace various steps that require multiple machines and multiple logistics to produce a part. We are now able to handle that in one process.”

When the machine first became operational, Benjamin Steel saw approximately $5,000 in monthly processing revenue. That quickly jumped to $10,000, $20,000, then $25,000 in the first six months that Benjamin had the machine. Now more than a year later, Benjamin Steel regularly exceeds $30,000 each month in processing revenue from the FabriGear, which operates on three shifts, around the clock, five days a week. “Approximately one year after installation, we decided to add a third operator to enable us to run production on the equipment on all three shifts,” Demana said. “Initially we were producing parts that amounted to about one truckload of steel per month. We are now averaging three or more truckloads of finished parts per month.”

The increased processing capabilities led to new customers, which increased Benjamin Steel’s material sales as well. According to Demana, 80 to 90 percent of the material run on the FabriGear is from existing customers, 10 to 20 percent is new business. The ability to perform intricate processing also has led Benjamin Steel to offer design assistance to its customers in order to make the best use of the FabriGear.

“We’ve got to work hand-in-hand with customers to help them develop their designs and the design process,” Demana explains. “We saw this as an important opportunity early on, but we did not anticipate this concept would become a reality in our everyday selling and marketing as it has.”

As a result, Benjamin Steel’s sales force is becoming more manufacturing-oriented and Demana is considering adding a sales engineer position. In the meantime, the sales force is planning to take an advanced training class at Mazak Optonics to give it a better handle on the FabriGear’s ­capabilities as they relate to customer needs.

The FabriGear 150 is a multi-axis, automated rotary laser that can fabricate tube, pipe, and structural shapes with all the contours and bevels needed for tight fits on a wide variety of pipe joints and additional intersecting or adjoining pipes. To achieve these complex 3D shapes, the FabriGear’s 64-bit CNC simultaneously controls a five-axis laser cutting system and four programmable rotary chucks. The tight dimensional accuracies that result from laser cutting can eliminate time and costs in such downstream operations as fitting, welding, and weld prep.
“Our processing services are value-added activities and something we’ve been focusing on as a whole in the last few years,” Demana says. “They are extremely important to the success of our company.”

Demana says steel bars, structural shapes, tubing, and pipe – in addition to sheet and plate – are his company’s core products.  “Therefore, the FabriGear very much fits with what we value in terms of continuing to increase our processing sales,” he says.

Among the products Benjamin Steel processes for customers are structural components for a tower that houses agricultural equipment, parts for jail cell doors, lift truck parts, crane parts, exhaust tubing, parts for manufacturing plant racking and storage systems, truck bed ramping and framing, and various heavy equipment and conveyor equipment. The company also is able to do some prototype work and produce samples that Demana says is an investment in the future.

“We bought the machine without having one customer that we knew for sure was going to order product from us,” Demana says. “The little bit of analysis and soul searching we did led us to believe that this is the right direction for us to go, because it is very clear that our industry is doing more and more manufacturing-like activities. And it’s very clear that value-added processes are going to continue to be vitally important to our future.”

“Lo and behold it’s turned out to be a very wise investment for us,” he says.

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