Everyone knows about the welder shortage. It’s become a given for anyone in manufacturing and construction. Amid all these challenges, Mike Lang sees opportunity.

Lang is a senior fellow and global director of corporate welding services at Fluor’s construction and fabrication division. For several years he’s traveled to various industry events, including last year’s FABTECH in Chicago, to talk about what he calls the “welding economy”—that is, the true costs behind welding and what a company can do to mitigate those overall costs, particularly for project-based welding in the industrial and construction markets.

Why delve into welding economics? As Lang put it, he wants to “bridge the gap” between technical people and financial people. Welding experts and engineers are entrenched in the technology, managers are entrenched in finances, and quite often the two don’t speak the same language. “We wanted to communicate welding in dollars and cents terms.”

Read more at The Fabricator

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