Manufacturing buyers and engineers face greater and greater challenges!
North American manufacturing is under siege from
off-shore production. As such:
- Management insists on drastic reductions in parts costs
- Faster and easier assemblies are a “must”
- Lower parts inventories needed to meet investment limits
- Faster parts sourcing and turnaround times are “do or die”
Delivery reliability is expensive and not always there when
you really need it
- No service priority considered for second tier customers of larger vendors
- Reasonable pricing only gained with high minimum order
- Complex coordination of off-shore freight and time wasting expediting
Rapid prototyping only a concept and not reality?
- Delays of prototype delivery are deadly to project completion
- Expensive mold investments often scrapped with further design changes
- Now you have a prototype, how do you get production parts fast?
Rejected production parts mean costly delays in assembly
- Rejected large volume batch runs can ruin sales and customer deliveries
- Off-shore vendor production inspection is costly and often ineffective
