If you’re in the business of making goods for the consumer market, you can’t overlook opportunities to save money. That’s commonly achieved in manufacturing by judiciously deciding which stages of your build process must happen in-house, and then focusing your investment on them. In many cases, that results in the outsourcing of most if not all of the actual fabrication steps in the process, allowing your company to focus on quality control over the parts and fully assembled build. It’s not a new idea, but it is one that many small business owners wrestle with as they get established.
External Machining and Rough Manufacture
Both the fine fabrication of individual parts and the roughing out process via techniques like extrusion or molding can be sourced to suppliers, and many major brands have a constellation of manufacturers positioned around the country, allowing for individual assembly factories that provide the finished products to regional distributors. This model is frequently used for international operations, where sending parts from one country to another might be prohibitively expensive. Large companies operating in a single nation also sometimes choose to create a central assembly space, providing for a great productive output that relies on nearby contract machining to minimize the cost of transporting supply line parts. From there, a national distributor takes care of bringing products to market.
Advantages of Outsourced Machining
While you do surrender some control over the process when you hire out machine work, you save a lot on the major capital expenses that come with bringing the operation in-house. In most cases, even if it does eventually cost more to pay for the service than it would to invest in the equipment you need to do it yourself, that date is years out. It’s much better for small businesses with limited resources and mid-sized companies alike to find a supply line partner who works with your representatives to develop robust quality controls, allowing you to focus less on the individual parts and more on the product as a whole.