Controlling labor costs has become a full-time job for many OEM purchasing and operations teams. You’re fighting long lead times. You’re balancing staffing shortages. You’re watching production schedules slip because fabrication techs are tied up cutting channel rather than focusing on your competency: manufacturing and assembling your products.
Unistrut Service Company spends all day solving those headaches. We partner with OEMs in electrical enclosures, conveyor systems, material handling, and renewable energy manufacturing to shift the most tedious, stop-and-start tasks off your shop floor and onto ours. You stay focused on your core builds. The labor savings follow.
It all comes back to our customer pledge: Done Right-Done Fast.
What’s eating your labor hours?
Cutting channel. Measuring channel. Cutting again because the first one was half a mark off. Deburring sharp edges. Making sure the piece fits into the assembly and logging each cut piece into inventory. It all looks so basic on the surface. Then you track the hours.
Suddenly, the “cheap” task is one of your most expensive.
Even with great people and proven processes, the reality is:
• Manual cutting slows throughput.
• Variation creeps in when production is moving fast.
• Rework and scrap chew up margins.
• Operators lose time shifting between machines and assemblies.
• That stack of Unistrut hasn’t moved all day while orders pile up.
You’re not alone...this is one of the most common bottlenecks we see in OEM manufacturing environments.
USC eliminates the Drag
Our job is to eliminate the complexity and inconsistency of Unistrut-style metal framing components before they reach your dock.
Here’s what you get when you hand the cutting to us:
✅ High-volume precision cutting on both solid and perforated metal framing
✅ Tolerances held to +/- 1/16 inch
✅ Fully deburred pieces that are ready to install
✅ Repeatability from part one to part ten-thousand
✅ Zero edge clean-up or grinding on your end
That +/-1/16 inch tolerance doesn’t sound flashy at first glance. Then you try running repeat cuts in-house, day after day, at scale, while maintaining that tolerance consistently across operators, shifts, and different machines. Suddenly it’s not so simple…or cheap.
Make receiving your easiest job of the day
There’s one more slice of labor cost that OEMs often overlook: the receiving side.
Every time you bring in a large bundle of 10-foot channel, someone has to:
• Receive the material
• Track it to a cutting queue
• Log the outputs into individual part numbers
• Release it to production in discreet batches
We’d rather make that effortless.
We can:
• Create and manage your part number in our ERP
• Or supply a pre-cut channel to your specific length
• Package and label everything in clean kits
• Deliver product to staging, ready to bolt into your build
Instead of tying up labor to turn a single raw item into 6 different SKUs, you receive precisely what production needs. No drama. No extra handling. No rework.
What does that mean for your labor budget?
Real numbers vary by shop, but what we consistently hear from OEM partners looks like this:
• Cutting labor hours reduced by 30-50 percent
• Scrap costs shrink dramatically
• Throughput improves because operators stay on actual value-add tasks
• Production schedules tighten up instead of slipping
Those benefits compound across every part you build.
Scale without adding headcount
Rather than scrambling to hire labor every time demand jumps, OEMs save more by letting USC handle the cutting and prep. You protect your margins. You defend your people’s time. You preserve your customer delivery promises.
Done Right-Done Fast is more than our tagline. It’s how we make sure your cost-reduction plan doesn’t come at the expense of quality or deadlines.
If trimming labor drag and smoothing production flow is on your to-do list this quarter, let’s talk about the metal framing channel in your products that’s holding you up. We’ll help you get back to building the critical stuff. To learn more about how we work with customers just like you, visit our OEM Solutions page or contact the USC team of experts for immediate assistance.