Walk into most fab shops and you'll find the welding consumables in a cabinet, a few shelves or a set of drawers next to the welding cells. Contact tips, nozzles, diffusers, liners, tungsten, TIG cups, plasma electrodes and nozzles, grinding wheels, flap discs, gloves and lenses. When it's well run, welders grab what they need and keep working. When it's not, they cannibalize parts from the gun at the next booth.
The welding distributor who keeps that cabinet stocked owns the account. But doing it with a rep counting drawers on paper and emailing the results doesn't scale, and it eats the margin on what are mostly small-ticket items.
Label the cabinet
The app prints barcode bin labels for every crib and bin. Each label carries your item: the tip size and thread, the nozzle bore, the liner length, the tungsten type and diameter, the flap disc diameter and grit. When a welder takes the last box of tips, he scans the label on the empty drawer and the reorder is exactly right.
A shop lead with a scanner gun can walk the cabinet at the end of the week, scan everything that's low and upload the whole batch in one go.
Counts and a suggested order
For accounts where your rep counts the consumables, counts and receiving run on a phone and go to your system to post. After each count, the app suggests an order: the max, minus what's on hand, minus what's on order, rounded up to the pack size. In welding that matters. Tips come in boxes of ten or twenty-five, flap discs by the box, wire by the spool or drum, and nobody wants to break a pack to send three.
Receiving runs on the phone too, so the shop knows what arrived and you know it was checked in.
One page for the site
For larger manufacturers with robotic cells, multiple welding bays or a full tool crib, the on-site program puts everything on one page:
- A plant dashboard: tap any crib, vending machine or RFID rack to see its bins from the front and the top.
- The floor plan to scale, with drag and drop and a CAD download, to show where a consumables cabinet should sit near the cells.
- Counting bins, what's on hand and where, and every machine and bin with exact sizes.
- A showcase you can use to sell the same program to the next plant.
When the plant's maintenance manager asks how many robot torch consumables are on the shelf, the answer is on the page.
Protect yourself on special stock
Welding customers ask you to stock their specialties: a stainless or aluminum filler only one job uses, a particular robot torch's consumables, a brand of tip the shop insists on. Then the contract ends or the robot gets replaced, and the stock is yours.
Dedicated custom inventory agreements handle it. The customer signs for items stocked just for them, gets notices at six months, then 90, 60 and 30 days, and anything left is invoiced at 12 months. It's fair, it's in writing and it keeps one customer's job from becoming your dead stock.
A consumables cabinet you manage well is hard for a competitor to take. Every labeled drawer is a reorder that comes to you, and every count that posts on its own gives your rep time to talk about the next machine or the switch to a better wire.
Ready to walk through it with your own accounts? Book a demo.