Joe White Tank (JWT)

Challenges that Forced Them to Investigate New Solutions

Since 1942, Joe White Tank (JWT) has been an industry leader in the fabrication of custom tanks. JWT manufactures a large variety of industry-specific vessels designed for their customers’ needs. They have become recognized throughout the industry for their ability to provide quality products while consistently beating market lead times.

The number one challenge for JWT was scaling manpower for projects. “Balancing a stable workforce with changing customer and industry demands can be difficult. Our organization’s culture is very important to our management team so as we have grown our company’s market presence, we have worked to limit high employee turnover,” says Jeff Warr, Director at JWT.

“Piping projects can require hard starts and stops with little time to ramp labor force up and down. Hiring and firing welders for jobs was not our idea of success. We pursued growing our business with a long-term mindset. By adding the SWR to our equipment list, we added capacity strategically and avoided many of the negative implications that come from a short-term, job-to-job, labor force.”

Novarc’s Spool Welding Robot

Novarc’s Spool Welding Robot (SWR) is a cobot (collaborative robot), designed specifically for pipes, pressure vessels, and other types of roll welding. Being a cobot, the SWR combats the shortage of highly qualified welders by working with a less experienced operator to significantly improve shop productivity, and produce high-quality welds every single time.

“What made the SWR stand out was its ability to integrate multiple positioners; I very easily saw how we would have constraints if we didn’t have multiple positioners. Other welding solutions that were out there could weld just as fast, but they required us to chuck and un-chuck while the robot is sitting idle. What we liked about the SWR was the limited downtime between spools. That has proved a huge benefit to our daily throughput,” says Warr.

The Bottom Line

Since implementing the SWR, JWT has been able to:

• Increase their pipe welding productivity by 3.1X
• Increase their shop capacity and accept short lead-time projects
• Lower the number of welders dedicated to piping by over 70%.