Being Great at the "Big Three"

Being great at the "Big Three"

March 24, 2025
By the Blue Print editorial team with in-house Fastenal experts

Resources to help you win at safety, metalworking, and fasteners.

There’s a saying in the manufacturing world: The best supply chain wins. Other things being equal, if your supply chain is more cost-effective, efficient, and reliable than the next guy’s, you’ll deliver better value to the customer, and the market will choose YOU.

For many facilities, this advantage can hinge on three pivotal product categories: safety, metalworking, and fasteners. Why these three? Because they’re deeply woven into daily workflows. A great safety program boosts employee productivity and morale across the board. A great metalworking program is jet fuel for cost savings and throughput. And a great fastener program … well, it literally holds everything together. Combine all three and you’ve taken the high ground in the battle of supply chains.

Here’s where a strong partner can make a difference – by bringing in experts, technology, and local support to help you solve problems and modernize processes. What can this partnership look like in practice? Let’s hear from three experts in their fields about how a specialized team can help you improve your safety, metalworking, and fastener programs.

Protecting your team (and supply chain) with safety specialists

By Chuck Davis | Director of Sales, Safety, Health, and Sustainability Solutions

Safety and sustainability are crucial both in the boardroom and on the plant floor. Fastenal’s safety and sustainability services were developed from customer requests to keep employees safe, businesses secure, and programs sustainable.

You can bring in experts who handle things like eye, hand, and foot protection. Experts who offer assessments that directly affect your bottom line and safety performance. People who work WITH you to find improvements – from assessing and mitigating hazards, to optimizing safety category spend, to streamlining and protecting the supply chain for critical PPE.

At Fastenal, we offer 14 hazard assessments essential to industrial workplace safety. You can identify what’s needed and what’s not, eliminating products or processes holding your operation back. For example, say you’re using several different style of cut-resistant gloves; the assessment process can help you consolidate it to just the appropriate gloves that combine the features needed to protect your team.

This creates cost savings to subsidize safety improvements on other fronts.

That’s the advantage of an outside safety partner. You get an unbiased perspective that can lead to cost savings and better outcomes. We become an extension of your team. An added benefit is our objective to help align your EHS and procurement teams’ goals, creating structure for collaboration.

The need for sustainability grows by the day. While recycling is often a focus, it can be challenging to recycle PPE and other industrial materials. To help, we facilitate programs to recycle everything from gloves and glasses to carbide inserts used in metalworking. Our PPE recovery program is an example of how to transform non-sorted material waste into usable energy.

As we expand into clean room, aerospace, oil and gas, and other sectors, we anticipate additional support requests. We will continue developing models to help keep employees safe, businesses secure, and programs sustainable.

Safety at a glance:

Hazard assessments
PPE trainings and fittings
Technical training and testing services
Equipment/asset inspections
Recycling programs

Honing your edge with metalworking experts

By Brad Beetch | Director of Sales, Metalworking

Buying a cutting tool seems simple. You want a part for a specific machine and job. But what you NEED is the BEST part in terms of lifetime cost per cut. How do you find it? With an expert.

An expert is someone who knows the technology landscape, has practical machining experience, and uses scientific methods to determine (a) the best tool for the job and (b) the best way to run it. Ask for comparative testing to prove out the most cost-effective option.

The impact can be transformative. Case in point: We helped a Tulsa oil facility cut their 40-hour cycle on frac pumps in half. This method then spread to other sites, helping them take back their time and improve overall efficiency.

A partner helps in ways that don’t create friction for you, don’t add unnecessary storage space, or waste time where you pick up your supplies. A true partner offers solutions to prevent that, like point-of-use technology that ensures a continuous supply of tools while cutting down on workers’ walk time.

For example, our Metalworking 4.0 project aims to enhance service by improving data access and streamlining order processes. This project will transform metalworking in the next five years, making it easier for you to purchase the right tools and forge stronger partnerships.

This is a what a metalworking expert offers. We provide an objective set of eyes and years of experience. We don’t stop with servicing your existing products; we present opportunities for you to improve them in terms of productivity, tool life, and cost savings.

Key metalworking offerings:

Product and process analysis
Field application specialists (with years of production experience)
Comparative tool testing
Tool and cutter regrind service
Custom tool manufacturing

Tightening things up with fastener application engineers

By Abe Folkerts | Engineering Manager

If I told you one change could lead to cost savings, greater efficiency, and increased reliability, you'd be all ears, right? Well, fasteners can often be that one change. Yes, fasteners tend to be small, low-cost parts – an unglamorous aspect of production. But an engineering team dedicated to fasteners, well, they sweat the small stuff. If you’re looking to reduce cost and risk, look for an engineering team with knowledge of all things fasteners, such as proper installation torque and the latest fastener technology.

Ask if the team can help you with quality support. Need a corrosion or tensile strength test – or any fastener test? Make sure the team can do it. Just looking for cost savings? A good fastener partner will take the time to walk through your assembly line and seek out nonvalue – added steps that can be fixed with fastener-centric solutions.

Fasteners are (metaphorically) bigger than you think. For example, in a bill of materials, fasteners might account for 3-5% of the cost. However, when an assembled unit fails, 60 to 70% of the time it can be traced back to a fastener. THAT is how crucial fasteners are and how much it can harm your bottom line to overlook them.

It’s not just about avoiding risk; it’s about discovering opportunities. A real-world example: After switching to a Holo-Krome MATpoint bolt, one customer saved $60,000 a year on aluminum scrap. The waste was caused by a cross-threading issue during production. Because MATpoint fasteners self-align during installation, the cross-threading (and scrap) issue was reduced significantly. This is the value of bringing in engineers with fastener expertise. We focus solely on fasteners, so you don’t have to.

Fastener engineering highlights:

Assistance with prints and technical questions
Testing and failure analysis
Product teardowns and assembly reviews
Onsite fastener application trainings
SKU consolidation projects

The takeaway

Safety, metalworking, and fastener products are critical to production and ingrained in your daily processes. They’re also nuanced fields that require specialized expertise. Bringing in specialist support in “the big three” can be a powerful way to take back time, reduce costs, and gain a competitive edge in your industry. As they say: the best supply chain wins.