“The welder’s know-how is still what matters – the machine just calculates faster” – an interview with the managing director of INOX Factory

INOX Factory Kft. manufactures stainless, acid-resistant and carbon steel welded structures in Berettyóújfalu, Hungary, certified to EN 1090, ISO 3834-2 and ISO 9001. In recent years the company has rebuilt not only its production hall but also the systems running in the background – developing its own enterprise resource planning system and an artificial intelligence that runs in-house. We asked the managing director about this, and about what it all means for the people who work here.

“I didn’t buy a factory – I took on a team”

Let’s start at the beginning. What keeps you here – why steel structures, and why Berettyóújfalu?

If you run a welding shop, you don’t choose the steel, you choose the people. The steel doesn’t go home in the evening – your colleagues do, and in the morning it’s them who decide what quality we lift from the crane onto the truck. On paper, our certificates – EN 1090 and ISO 3834-2 – belong to the company. In reality they are in the hands of the people who work in the hall every day. That’s what keeps me here: a team that both the customer and I can trust with our name.

What does commitment to the company mean to you?

That we don’t plan for the next quarter. You don’t build a hall, a cutting machine or a paint shop because it will pay off next year, but because the next generation will be working with it here. The same goes for dual vocational training: we are an accredited training company, and welding apprentices learn their trade with us. In the short term that costs time and attention; in the long term it is the company’s future.

About the colleagues

You talk a lot about people. What do you do for them day to day?

First: talk. Not in meetings, but at the workbench. Second: when someone says something isn’t right – a fixture, a weld preparation, a deadline – that isn’t a complaint, it’s information. The welder sees what we can’t see from the office.

Third is decency in difficult moments. A small company has no HR department to “handle” this. It’s me, and the colleagues who are there for each other. If someone has trouble in their family, it isn’t a policy that solves it – it’s the others taking over their work, and them knowing they have a place to come back to.

What is the hardest part?

That sometimes the deadline and the person ask for the same attention on the same day. The customer rightly expects delivery; the colleague rightly expects not to be worn down by it. You can’t solve this once and for all – you have to decide again every week. This is exactly where our systems help – more on that in a moment: if paperwork and calculations don’t eat up the day, there is more time left for the decisions that really are human.

Artificial intelligence in a welding shop

That’s not what you’d expect from a steel structure manufacturer. Where did the AI come from?

From quotations. Until now, we priced a welded structure by having someone sit down with the drawing and work out the plates, the profiles, the weld lengths, the bends and the surface to be painted – hours, sometimes days for a more complex subassembly. Meanwhile the customer asks three companies for a quote, and the one that answers quickly and accurately wins.

Today, the 3D model – the STEP file – is read by a system we built ourselves. It recognises which part is a laser-cut plate, which is bent, which is a tube or a turned part; it calculates the weight, the cutting length and the welds, and prices it from our own real rate table. Importantly, the price is not “made up” by the artificial intelligence – it comes from a deterministic calculation that can be checked and traced. The AI helps in that a colleague can ask it questions in Hungarian, request drawings and material lists, and even have it build the model when only a sketch is available.

Why develop it yourselves – why not use an off-the-shelf service?

Two reasons. The first is data: our customers’ drawings must not leave the company. Our system runs in-house, and the models work under our own control. The second is that a welding shop’s know-how isn’t generic: how long fit-up takes for a 2 mm stainless steel sheet, or when plasma is cheaper than laser – that is what we know, and that is what we built into the system. Our own enterprise resource planning system, the shop-floor terminals and the displays in the hall are built on the same foundation: the information is in one place and reaches the people who work with it.

Are your colleagues afraid that AI will take their jobs?

We talked about it openly. A computer can’t do the welding, and it won’t inspect a fillet weld for us either. What it takes away is the calculating, the searching and typing the same thing in three times. If that means a colleague can spend half a day more in the workshop, or more time with an apprentice, that matters more to me than any technological novelty.

And what doesn’t change

If we talk again in five years, what will be different – and what won’t?

The machines will be different, the software will be different, and I hope the hall will be bigger. What won’t change is that I know everyone who works here by name, and that the customer gets a person’s signature at the bottom of the quotation – even if a system helped to put the numbers together.

INOX Factory Kft. manufactures welded steel structures and stainless and carbon steel subassemblies in Berettyóújfalu, Hungary. If you would like a quotation or are interested in dual vocational training, please get in touch.