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When You Can’t Hire Welders, Automate Instead
Ask a heavy-industry fabricator what keeps them up at night and the answer rarely starts with machines. It starts with people. Skilled manual welders are hard to find and harder to keep, and you can’t conjure them when the order book fills up. For a shop building large pressure vessels, that gap decides what work you can take on.
FA-TEC, a Swedish contract manufacturer (legoindustri) in Falkenberg, hit that wall. The company builds low-volume, high-complexity work for energy, defence, and pressure-vessel buyers, where a weld either holds to spec or it doesn’t ship. The demand was there. The welders to meet it by hand were not.
So FA-TEC made a call more fabricators reach every year. Instead of chasing a recruitment race it couldn’t win, the company raised its level of automation and turned its existing team into operators of a system that does the heavy lifting.
The shortage is the strategy
“Securing competence is our main focus, and it’s hard to find skilled welders, so we have to work towards raising the level of automation,” says CEO Jonas Kjällström.
That reframes how automation gets justified. The old pitch was speed and consistency. Both still matter. But for FA-TEC the real return is the ability to keep producing at all when the labour market is squeezed dry. One skilled operator running an automated station lays down weld that would otherwise take several manual welders and far more hours.
What went onto the floor
FA-TEC brought in a Pema assembly station with a welding column and boom (kransvets), a positioner (lägeställare), and a long-track assembly line.
The capacity range suits FA-TEC’s mix: outer diameters from 1,500 mm up to 4,000 mm, and lengths up to 25 metres. Vessels sit on heavy-duty turning rolls while the boom welds. The part rotates, the arc stays put, and the operator runs the pass from a fixed position. No wrestling tonnes of steel into place for every seam.
The station runs two welding methods from Lincoln Electric sources. For heavy structural seams, it uses submerged arc welding (Method 121, SAW) on a 1000 A AC/DC source, the workhorse for high-deposition welds on thick material. For more versatile joints, the same station switches to MIG/MAG (Method 135) on a 500 A source. The process matches the joint without moving the part to another cell.
The detail that won the partnership
Off-the-shelf welding lines come with a fixed minimum diameter. Dip below it and the line won’t take the part. FA-TEC’s mix spans four-metre giants and much smaller vessels, so that floor was a real problem.
The factor that tipped the decision to Pemamek was a willingness to redesign the station to handle diameters below the standard specification. Pemamek engineered the line to reach lower, so FA-TEC could run small and large vessels on one setup. That’s the difference between buying a machine and buying a fit.
Two lines, one boom, off the scaffolding
A welding column and boom is serious capital, and idle capital earns nothing. A swivel mechanism (drellsystem) on a dual-rail layout lets the boom rotate between two production lines. While one line welds, the other gets loaded and fit up, so the heavy machinery stays busy.
There’s a safety dividend too. “We have screens, we avoid having to go up and be at high heights to weld,” says operator Jörgen Ekerö. Operators now monitor the arc from ground-level control panels, out of the sparks and off the platforms.
The number that makes the case
“Since we got these machines, on a vessel like this you save about 60 to 80 hours,” says Ekerö. Sixty to eighty hours of skilled labour removed from every vessel, in a market where that labour is the scarcest resource you have.
FA-TEC couldn’t hire its way forward. Automation was the way forward. More productivity. More competitiveness. Fast return on investment.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Skilled manual welders are hard to find and harder to keep, and recruitment alone could not meet FA-TEC’s demand. Rather than chase a hiring race it couldn’t win, FA-TEC raised its level of automation and turned its existing team into operators of a Pema welding system. As CEO Jonas Kjällström puts it, securing competence is the company’s main focus, and automation is how they close the gap when skilled welders are scarce.
Roughly 60 to 80 hours of skilled labour per vessel, according to FA-TEC operator Jörgen Ekerö. Those are hours the team can redirect to the next order instead of spending them on manual repositioning and multi-pass welding. Across a year of production, that saving pays back the equipment several times over.
Two methods, both powered by Lincoln Electric sources. For heavy structural seams, the station runs submerged arc welding (Method 121, SAW) on a 1000 A AC/DC source, ideal for high-deposition welds on thick pressure-vessel material. For more versatile joints, the same station switches to MIG/MAG welding (Method 135) on a 500 A source. The process matches the joint without moving the part to another cell.
Yes. Most off-the-shelf welding lines come with a fixed minimum diameter, which would have forced FA-TEC to run a separate process for its smaller vessels. Pemamek redesigned the assembly station to reach below its usual minimum, so FA-TEC could build both its small-diameter and four-metre vessels on one automated setup.
Operators monitor the welding arc in real time from digital control panels at ground level, well away from sparks and fall hazards. On a four-metre vessel, manual welding once meant working at height on platforms. Moving operators to the ground improves ergonomics, lowers insurance exposure, and speeds up fine adjustments through a clear interface.
