Automatic for the future

ational Tube Supply (NTS) distributes carbon and alloy round mechanical tubing. NTS supports OEMs, machine shops and other distributors in the oil and gas, agriculture and construction, fluid power, and general equipment manufacturing industries.

NTS is a division of the Bianco Group, a family-owned company with stakeholders based in Europe. With its U.S. headquarters in University Park, Illinois, and branches in Moreno Valley, California; Baytown, Texas; Beaver, West Virginia; and Mississauga, Ontario, the company is able to support customers across North America by providing cut-to-length materials quickly and reliably.

At the core of its business model, NTS offers quick turnarounds on both random lengths and cut parts. An inventory of over 30,000 tons and more than 6,500 SKUs makes this kind of commitment possible.

Brian Kluge, chief operating officer of NTS, recognized that it was time for an innovative solution in order to remain competitive. “The focus was not simply backlog,” he says. “We wanted to change the way we think about efficiencies in handling finished products. If it were just a matter of backlog, we could have just added more machines.

“Simply throwing additional labor and sawing equipment at the problem would be an ongoing and endless task as the business continued to grow,” he says.

Instead, NTS sought an approach that would integrate a significant level of automation and carry the company through years of forecast growth. The goal, according to Kluge: Create equipment that could handle a multitude of sizes and weights and manage the process from infeed to palletizing.

“The need for a willing innovator led me to Behringer Saws. Although I had not worked directly with Behringer in the past, I was familiar with the company’s reputation as a high-quality machine builder,” notes Kluge.

Behringer Saws proposed starting with the HBM-540A model and then tailored it specifically to meet NTS’ needs. “That is where Behringer stood head and shoulders above the rest,” Kluge says. “They were ready to listen to our needs and provided a willingness to create the machine we envisioned.”

The combination of automatic functionality allows for the saw to run unattended for hours at a time. Through the PC control, the sawing system can manage multiple customers’ jobs of various material types, lengths and diameters without any interruption. Finished parts are palletized for shipping, and trim cuts and remnants are sorted separately for removal.

Even down to the installation, working with Behringer was effortless. “The timing of the installation occurred during the coronavirus pandemic, and Behringer was able to step in and provide installation and training without any missteps,” Kluge says. “I can’t say I wasn’t concerned about how things were going to go, but I was pleased they didn’t miss a beat.”

“Having done many projects throughout my 35 years in the steel industry, it’s very rare that you get exactly what you expected,” he says. “The most amazing part of the machine, other than it is one of a kind, is that it does exactly what we designed it to do. We took two saws out to replace it with one, all-inclusive Behringer saw.”

The custom sawing system is producing at 200 percent of the average square inch removal performance across any other bandsaws in NTS’ system.

“It’s a matter of keeping it filled with material on the infeed side,” Kluge says. “This is just the first step in changing how we both think and do things. We are now better positioned to support our customers’ tubing requirements, our commitment to service and our continued growth well into the future.”