High-Performance Wear Solutions

How We Collaborate with Customers to Solve Wear Issues

“Our advantage is our deep understanding of the materials.  It’s not just our ability to supply a part made from a particular material, but it’s the evaluation process and the science behind our work.” – Wear Expert Rob Davison

Meet the Wear Expert: Rob Davison, Senior Application Engineer, has nearly 25 years of experience in product drafting and design, product applications, new product development, and product management. His focus is on ensuring that customers have high-quality products to withstand the toughest environments.

Q: When you visit customers, is there a common theme or problem they face?

Rob Davison: The most common theme or problem I hear from customers is the need to solve the constraints on their processes. However, it’s a matter of how critical the problem is to their operation. If fixed, will they be able to go another shift without having to replace a tool? That’s valuable. However, it’s the issues that are constraints on their process where we discover and solve their biggest problems. As a result, it opens not just one shift of extra productivity, but maybe the solution will let them skip a whole maintenance cycle in their facility and then that extra productivity is more beneficial to them. Suddenly, we can solve more problems than just one. 

Ultimately, it’s a matter of figuring out how we can provide value to the customer.

Q: When you partner with customers, how do you evaluate their issues and collaborate to solve them?

This varies. Sometimes customers will come to us knowing their issue in advance.  They share the details of the bottleneck in their process with us, and then we collaborate with them to figure out how to best address the problem with our broad set of material solutions.  

Other times, we evaluate a customer’s needs through a general inquiry, such as a conversation or email. From there, we usually discover that we are just scratching the surface of a bigger issue and it almost always triggers a wear audit, which is when we walk through their facility and identify issues across their process. 

After the wear audit, we prioritize and solve the biggest issue first or the one that we know we can fix. We will then fix the other issues, because if you make one part last longer, there are now four other parts downstream that need to be wear proofed as well. 

Q: What are the advantages of Kennametal’s materials portfolio?

Our advantage is our deep understanding of the materials. It’s not just our ability to supply a part made from a particular material, but it’s the evaluation process and the science behind our work. Our first attempt in the development process is going to be well thought out because of our materials science capabilities and expertise.

At times, we know that we are not always going to be the best solution for all our customers’ problems, and we need to be honest with them about this. However, we will help in other applications where we can ensure quality and valuable solutions. Our transparency is another advantage of ours because we know how critical it is to build trust with our customers and provide help where we know we can support. 

Kennametal can deliver a broad range of wear-resistant solutions for your application needs.  From forging and shaping of materials to 3D printing to advanced materials and surface treatments, we have solutions that go the distance in the harshest environments.