How do you make important decisions about the future of your business?

If you’re like most successful leaders, you look for some hard data about the market and benchmark your company against other similar organizations. In order to do this, you need information that’s relevant to the metal forming and fabricating industry, as current as possible, and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. That’s where we come in.

FMA’s Forming & Fabricating Job Shop Consumption Report

Each quarter of the year, we distribute this survey to our association membership of over 2,500 to get current data on what small to medium sized job shops and fabricators are experiencing. The Forming & Fabricating Job Shop Consumption Report (FFJSCR) provides insights about hiring, new orders, material costs, capacity utilization, and more. With this first hand knowledge, gleaned from real shops operating in today’s economic conditions, we offer an effective analysis of what’s happening in the industry right now, and how job shop owners are responding to it.

The report features an introduction and explanation of how this data informs potential trends by Dr. Chris Kuehl, economic analyst for FMA. He addresses the positive trends with a prediction that most respondents are expecting to see increased demand after the election has ended and consumer confidence improves. He also discusses employment numbers, new orders, and improvements in the readings for both the Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) and the Credit Managers Index (CMI).

Tools like the FFJSCR are unique and invaluable to decision makers, as we all know how busy business owners can be. It would be difficult for an individual company to get responses like these on a case by case basis. FMA has created this survey to benefit the industry as a whole by gathering this hard-to-collect information in one place and providing it, without cost, to anyone who might use it. Whether you’re still considering an FMA membership, or you’ve been a part of our professional association of fabricators and manufacturers for years – this complimentary report is available for download from our online store now.