Another holiday season is upon us, which, of course, brings us near the end of another calendar year. While 2017 can only be described as “tumultuous” from a news headlines perspective, we hope the past year has been productive and successful for your business.
It was a big year for us here at Cass Precision Machining as we rebranded with a new name, logo and website that gives our customers a better view of the many ways that we can serve them.
The end of one calendar year and the beginning of a new one is always a good time for any business to reflect on their operations – to take an honest look at what’s working for you and identify areas where you could be doing better. One area to assess could be an evaluation of your machining suppliers. Switching your machining supplier can be a difficult decision to make, but choosing who supplies your incoming streams of raw materials, components or sub-assemblies can have a huge impact on your business.
In the first part of this series, we will discuss two key areas to assess in your relationship with your machining suppliers. If you find that your suppliers aren’t meeting your expectations in these areas, a switch to a new supplier could become a part of your 2018 continuous improvement plan.
- Reliability in Quality and Deliveries
It’s pretty simple: If you’re not able to rely on consistently high-quality results and on-time deliveries, you need to change your machining supplier. Nothing disrupts production flow like having to wait on incoming parts or finding yourself returning items to be reworked or replaced. Hidden costs for poor performance in these areas include expediting work and developing backup plans to recover from poor performance.
At Cass our customers tell us they are thrilled with our ability to ship on time – every time without having to follow up with us. In addition, quick responses to quote requests are a priority for us. We’ve developed a baseline quality assurance system that guarantees we will ship high-quality parts – on every order. Everything we make passes several in-process checks and a final inspection, or it won’t go out the door.
To sustain our ability to ship on time – every time, we recently completed a 26,000 sq. ft. expansion to our warehousing, shipping and receiving areas. The added space dramatically improves material flow within our campus and improves efficiencies in our shipping and receiving functions.
- Know-How
A great relationship with your machined parts supplier can be invaluable, as you tap into their DFM capabilities to discover better ways to make your parts than you’ve considered (e.g. a more robust or lower costing material for your application, or a slight adjustment in tolerances that reduces machining and inspection times and saves you money).
Cass has developed a proven quality system based on the year-over-year best-in-quality awards that we are humbled and honored to receive from our customers. We can seamlessly build upon our baseline quality system to meet your specifications, tailoring a quality-assurance system to your business needs.
Switching suppliers is never an issue to be taken lightly. The new year is a great time to look at your supplier relationships to see if you’re getting all you should out of your supplier network. We are ready to welcome you into our family of satisfied customers. Give us a call to learn how your company can benefit by partnering with Cass as your machined components supplier.