About Fårbo Manufacturing
Fårbo Manufacturing in Fagersta has been doing precision machining since 1988 — turning, milling, drilling, deep-hole drilling, laser machining and EDM, from one-off parts to contract series production. The company is privately owned and independent, and has grown sharply in recent years.
Its customers are in construction, defence, mining and power transmission. These are industries where a part is not approved simply because it measures up: the material has to be traceable, the certificate has to travel with it, and the requirement reaches all the way down into the supply chain.
Two business models run in parallel. Capacity subcontracting when a customer needs extra volume quickly, and outsourcing when a customer wants to hand over the whole flow — in which case Fårbo takes over purchasing, manufacturing and stockholding, with a promise of delivery from stock within three days. The second model turns administration into part of the product rather than a support function.
The company’s guiding principle is four words long: right at every step. Automation in both production and the supporting functions is stated openly as one of the routes there.
The challenge
Fårbo has grown fast with a comparatively small headcount, and production runs three shifts. The growth shows up not only in the machine park — it shows up in the order book, in the number of suppliers, and in the volume of paperwork that has to be right before a part is allowed to leave the building.
Three bottlenecks kept recurring. The customer order that has to get into the system quickly and correctly, whether it arrives as a PDF, an email or through a portal. The material that has to be bought in on time and arrive with the right certificate. And the night shift that runs into a question at half past two, when the office is empty and there is no production management to ask.
The last one rarely makes it into a spreadsheet. The question waits until morning, or the operator makes the call alone. Most of the time it is the right call. Sometimes it is scrap that nobody catches until inspection.
Three coworkers, three steps
Rather than automating one process, Fårbo chose to staff three. Each of them covers a step of the same chain.
Maria — customer orders
- Receives — reads incoming customer orders in any format and enters them into Monitor ERP with the right item, quantity and date.
- Checks — reconciles the order against quotation, agreement and previous deliveries before registering it.
- Confirms — replies to the customer with an order confirmation and a delivery date.
- Flags — escalates anything that deviates to a human instead of guessing.
Sven — purchasing, acknowledgements and material certificates
- Purchasing — turns demand into purchase orders with the right supplier, material and requested date.
- Order acknowledgements — reads the supplier’s confirmation and reconciles price, quantity and delivery date against the placed order.
- Material certificates — requests, checks and files the certificates, and links them to the right order and heat number so the traceability is there when the customer asks.
- Deviations — speaks up when a certificate is missing or does not match, before the material goes into production.
Stefan — digital production manager
- Always there — answers questions from the shop floor across all three shifts, giving the same answer at three in the morning as at ten in the morning.
- Knows the routines — works from the company’s documented procedures rather than from whoever happens to remember correctly.
- Finds the paperwork — pulls up the drawing, the process plan, the history and previous deviations for the part in question.
- Escalates — knows where the line is and wakes a human when the question calls for it.
Automation that frees up time rather than removing jobs
Fårbo describes the point themselves on their own website: a high degree of digitalisation and automation is meant to give technicians and operators time to focus that bit extra on every order — time spent making sure parts meet the spec and are delivered on time.
The same logic applies to Maria, Sven and Stefan. None of them does anything a human finds enjoyable. They register, reconcile, chase documents and answer the same question for the hundredth time. What is left for the people is the judgement, the customer relationship and the quality work.
And when three steps connect, the sum is greater than the parts. The order Maria registers correctly becomes a purchase Sven can place straight away. The certificate Sven secured is there when Stefan gets the question on the floor.
The effect
- Orders in the same day — registration and confirmation no longer depend on when someone gets to the inbox.
- Traceability without the hunt — material certificates are tied to order and heat number from the start.
- Shifts keep moving — questions get answered immediately on the evening and night shifts too, instead of waiting until the next morning.
- The same way every time — the routines are followed identically regardless of who is on site.
- Growth without matching admin — more orders and more suppliers do not require more hours of paperwork.
Next steps
Three steps are staffed. The same approach can be applied to quotation preparation, deviation handling and supplier follow-up — process by process, at the pace the business wants.