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SUBCONTRACTING SHEET METALWORK SOURCING INNOVATION
Online capacity
brokerage
An Estonia-headquartered business is bringing customers for, and suppliers of, sheet metalwork
together via an online quotation platform. Andrew Allcock spoke to one of the company’s founders
Martin Vares is one of three founders
of Fractory (https://fractory.com), an
online brokerage operation that
connects vetted, existing sheet metalworking
suppliers to customers.
An Estonian national, Vares is a degreeeducated
mechanical engineer who worked
at engineering companies that included
those involved in making pressure vessels
and natural gas drilling equipment. Custom
manufactured parts were the order of the
day, with all manufacturing of those parts
outsourced, including sheet metal items,
meaning that the co-founder was himself
personally confronted with the problem that
Fractory is now solving. That problem is
“outsourcing and its complications; high
consumption of time and inef ciency”.
More speci cally, he explains:
“Sometimes I would spend half of my week
trying to contact different suppliers and
nding the best solution. Of course, I could
have done it the simple way and gone to just
one of them, accept whatever price and lead
time they offered but, as an engineer, I
always have to improve, so that meant I was
spending a lot of time on it.
“That’s when I discovered that I have all
the information that manufacturing
companies need readily available for
production, pricing and providing the times
and so on, with manufacturing companies on
the other side knowing their machinery,
inventory and everything that goes into
pricing, but there was nothing connecting the
two streams of information. That is where
the idea of Fractory was born, to automate
the communication between two ‘layers’ that
are already in the market.”
Together with joint co-founders Joosep
Merelaht and Rein Torm, Fractory was
established in July 2017 in Estonia.
Headquartered in Tartu and today employing
16 there, the company launched its rst
product in November that year, aiming at the
Nordic and Baltic markets, but it drew UK
attention. “We started to pick up traction in
the UK, which we saw as the best potential
market for us to tackle next. The UK is also
one of the biggest markets in Europe.”
The company now has ve people located
in its Manchester of ce and is looking to add
more. Already 50% of Fractory’s orders
originate from the UK, and the supplier
network takes in 50+ machines in the UK
and a further 150+ in Europe, taking in
Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and
countries where machines are, plus
Belgium, Netherlands and Norway, plus,
more surprisingly, the USA and Australia.
So, what is it that Fractory actually
offers? Easy online sourcing for laser/
plasma-cut sheet or tube, plus bending,
based on uploaded part les – 3D models
(.stp and .step les). Fractory is an
Buyers of sheet metal
parts now have a
single-source solution
– Fractory
intermediary – a platform for suppliers and a
single-source contact for customers.
“We don’t own any manufacturing equipment
ourselves. Our platform is between the
customers and suppliers. All the software
that is the core of our business is developed
by us; we started from scratch, building it
from the middle of 2017. We have
developed it further and further;
ve members of our team in
Estonia are software developers –
everything from design to data
science – taking in input from our
customers and suppliers. Rather than going
out and building a huge system beforehand,
we launched with a very simple product and
are constantly developing, making sure we
deliver what the market wants and needs.”
All suppliers use the same software to
www.machinery.co.uk @MachineryTweets August 2019 23
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Sweden. Customers originate in all of those
support quoting; that is where Fractory
Tartu
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/fractory.com)
/www.machinery.co.uk