A Technology Roadmap for Welding and Joining in Canada — The Challenges to the Canadian Welding and Joining Industry

• Globalization Creates Competitive Pressures… and Opportunities
• Technology Critical Mass Must Grow
• Human Resources and Education Are Critical
• But Is the Canadian Welding and Joining Community in a Downward Spiral?
• Moving Forward

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The fundamental question is how much of the manufacturing — and the enabling welding and joining — will continue to take place in North America and, in particular, Canada? Three mega-trends facing the Canadian welding and joining industry are:

Globalization Creates Competitive Pressures… and Opportunities

As with many industries in Canada, the most important mega-trend facing the welding and joining industry is the globalization of business. All of the industries for which welding is an enabling technology are becoming increasingly global in nature and competition is worldwide. The pressure of markets and customers fuels the drive for increased productivity in manufacturing and forces supplier industries to be more cost-competitive. Although the demand for welding would appear to be very strong for the coming decade given the overall development needs for worldwide manufacturing and infrastructure projects, Canada will face increased competition from new competitors.

China and other Asian countries present the most serious challenge as a competitor to industry in Canada and North America in general. Not only are such countries "catching up", but are now — in many instances — "leap-froging" in terms of the technology that they are able to use and apply cost-effectively.

When this is combined with the continued absence of world-wide free trade, Canada's market share of manufacturing and hence welding and joining worldwide is threatened. But, at the same time that globalization presents challenges to the Canadian welding industry, it also presents opportunities. Competition forces all industries to attempt to shorten the new product development cycle and to integrate increased performance and enhancements in product quality — and all of this at more affordable prices.

Technology Critical Mass Must Grow

In a globalized world Canada needs to stay well ahead of others on the welding technology development and applications curve. This includes dealing with the "unknowns" and developing strategies to react to emerging technologies in the user industries.

The challenge for the Canadian welding industry in the next decade will be:

• To maximize the application of existing technology, and
• The development, integration and implementation of new technologies that reduces the "time to market".

A consensus in industry exists that the level of Research and Development is far too low in Canada and that the critical mass must grow exponentially. This requires both a greater R&D investment by industry itself and commitment by the federal government and provincial governments to support such investment.

Human Resources and Education Are Critical

There is a shortage of skilled welders everywhere in the world, and it is only getting worse as each year passes.

Job prospects for welding-related employment in the coming years are excellent — resulting not only from growth in user industries — particularly oil and gas projects in Alberta — but also because of the need to replace an ageing workforce.

Given the task of the Canadian welding industry to gain a competitive edge over the next ten years and drive innovations in technology, clearly the attraction of new entrants into welding and welding-related professions is a priority for the future. This will require a greater commitment by both industry and government to invest in labour force development. Changing the image of the welding industry to make it an exciting and attractive career choice for young people — both male and female — is crucial.

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But Is the Canadian Welding and Joining Community in a Downward Spiral?

A background paper was prepared for the regional welding and joining TRM Forums in Montreal, Cambridge, Edmonton and Halifax. In that paper the author suggested that a "downward spiral" existed in the Canadian welding and joining community. The majority of participants in the Forums agreed with this assessment. The essence of the argument is as follows.

Underlying Assumption

If responsible individuals have ready access to high quality information about the technical capabilities of processes such as welding, the vast majority of decisions about product technology content, manufacturing and repair can be distilled down to simple questions of money. That is, those product configurations and manufacturing methods will be selected that are likely to generate the highest ratio of value in the marketplace or at use, relative to the input costs.

An Example

For instance, an exemplary version of the way in which welding stakeholders could position themselves may be taken from the educational publications of the Lincoln Electric Co in the 1930–1950's era. Their Welding Procedure Handbooks discussed in detail the technical and economic benefits of replacing castings with welded fabrications. They then went on to provide detailed instructions for the design and the fabrication of welded products. Today, the world of welding is much more complex, diverse and rapidly changing, certainly no longer susceptible to being captured in a handbook. But the principle remains that the penetration of a particular technology is intimately tied to the successful dissemination of high quality technical information (to executives, students and current practitioners) that will allow them to make good decisions and deploy the technology confidently.

The Issue — Welding Is not Treated as a Strategic Technology

Availability of superior scientific, engineering and practical knowledge in forms usable by decision makers appears to be the key to facilitating contributions to competitiveness by a technology like welding. A consensus exists that welding and joining in Canada and generally in North America currently tends not to be treated in education or in industry as a strategic technology for competitiveness. Its visibility and impact is actually waning, and a heroic effort will be needed to turn this negative trend around. The nuts and bolts of the problem are approximately as follows.

How the Downward Spiral Has Been Generated and Sustained

Most design engineers get some limited educational exposure to design of joints that could require welding. For those that need more information, quite a bit of detailed cookbook information is available in CSA, ASME, AWS, SAE and other standards, and through copying of prior welded product designs. For execution of the welded joints specified by the designer, the availability to manufacturing system designers of support from welding equipment and consumable manufacturers is actually extremely good in North America. The end result is that that most welded products and the systems that build them can be and are created by teams that don't include any welding specialists. That doesn't mean the resulting products are bad — in fact the persistence of this kind of status quo suggests that senior business executives are not dissatisfied with this generic approach to design and manufacturing engineering.

Only where welding has a really big role in the product, or in rare cases where executives have deliberately decided to create a strategic advantage by acquiring leading know-how, do we tend to see welding specialists employed.

Clearly, if no welding specialists are employed, there will be nobody prepared to take knowledge-based responsibility for implementing radical, possibly risky advances in product or manufacturing technology that go beyond standard marketplace offerings. That in turn will result in low demand for advanced welding processes, materials and equipment, which reinforces the view of welding as a commodity technology like bolts or adhesives, and results in the installation of nearly cookie-cutter copies of welding systems across whole industry segments.

The small number of post-secondary educational institutions in Canada with a significant stake in welding technology, welding engineering and/or welding research are acutely aware of the prevalence of the commodity attitude to welding technology in Canada. Every day, new painful examples appear of sub-optimal joining technology being deployed in industry by people who lack the knowledge to demand more from their processes and suppliers.

No Incentive for Educating Technologists, Engineers and Researchers

As part of this syndrome, the demand for newly graduated technologists, engineers and researchers with specialized welding knowledge remains scattered and has shown little growth in the past decade. That in turn has made it difficult for academic departments faced with pressures from many directions to devote increased resources to welding-related activity. Relatively little growth in student throughput also implies lack of growth — and in some cases even shrinkage — of capacity for welding R&D in Canadian universities and colleges. Therefore, the platform from which a welding vision for Canada is to be launched is at best seriously inadequate — mostly stretched to the limit just to maintain some sort of status quo. Even with a major injection of new resources into higher education and R&D in the short term, it will take a number of years to grow a new generation of sufficient people in industry and academe with advanced welding knowledge and confidence to lead Canada towards realizing the vision.

Moving Forward

Certainly the existence of such a downward spiral in the welding and joining community does not provide a strong platform for moving forward. On the other hand, recognition of the problem is the first step in making change happen. Canada cannot accept that this spiral should continue and all of the players in manufacturing and welding/joining must come together to implement a Vision and a Strategy not just to stop the spiral but to reverse its direction and move back to a position of strategic advantage.

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