When you picture precision, you may think of bespoke materials, meticulous quality checks, and painstaking handiwork– things that don’t necessarily bring high volume manufacturing to front of mind. Yet, many manufacturers must find the balance between maintaining a high product quality and increasing their manufacturing capacity to meet growing customer demands. While a precision manufacturer may be able to get off the ground with a lower throughput, scalability is critical to break into new markets, garner new customers, and uphold a reputation for fine product quality. In today’s article we’ll be taking a look at how manufacturers strike the balance between precision and scale– and how Boston Centerless fits into the equation.
To inform our understanding of scalable manufacturing solutions, let’s start by examining some of the most prominent challenges of high volume manufacturing for precision parts and assemblies.
The most direct issue to be avoided is parts falling outside of tolerance limits. Depending on the industry, tolerance limits can be anywhere within thousandths of an inch, microns, or even smaller than that. The narrower the tolerance limit, the tougher it may become to produce parts or assemblies on a larger scale. As the need to meet order quantities becomes greater, it’s not uncommon for tolerance limits to fall to the wayside in favor of more rapid manufacturing.
Next is the matter of material integrity, which impacts the overall quality and consistency of the final product between batches and production runs. There is of course an expectation that each part or product should perform just as well as any other– but there’s more to it than that. Precision parts are often subjected to very demanding applications where material quality and consistency absolutely cannot be compromised. If a part that came out of your facility fails to perform exactly as designed, it can put your entire brand’s reputation on the line– and that’s a cost which can’t be recuperated.
Manufacturers of all kinds must recognize that they may be subject to the capabilities of their suppliers, and precision manufacturers are no exception to this. In fact, they may be even more susceptible to supply chain challenges. With highly specific requirements, it may be difficult to find a reliable, cost-effective supplier to secure a partnership with. And if such a supplier were to deliver materials that did not meet precise tolerance requirements, or if they were to run behind schedule, what is a manufacturer to do? Supply chain redundancies and material alternatives may prevent a viable solution to help reduce risk for some, but this is not entirely viable for all precision manufacturers.
This brings us to the final issue of long or fluctuating lead times and the resultant manufacturing downtime. Longer than anticipated lead times from a supplier can result in unplanned downtime, which is often far more costly than any planned downtime will be. Although lead times and downtime can never be completely eliminated, an active effort to minimize them makes all the difference in the efficiency of any high volume manufacturing operation.
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While rife with challenges to overcome, the possibility of scaling up to high volume manufacturing is closer than you might think– maybe even within your reach. Successfully scaling your business is reliant on not just your own capabilities, but the capabilities of your business partners as well. These are a few ways that working with a precision material supplier like Boston Centerless can help you overcome the complex hurdles of high volume manufacturing with simple solutions.
With Boston Centerless, receiving material that is within your precise tolerance limits is never a matter of question. We achieve tighter tolerances than other methods of material processing through our namesake process of centerless grinding. This allows us to process material quickly, accurately, and at scale to meet the evolving needs of your business.
We maximize quality at the start by working with a curated collection of US and EU based suppliers of raw material. From there, we can test and validate materials for both surface-level and internal defects using tried and true testing methods such as ultrasonic testing, eddy current testing, x-ray fluorescence alloy verification, and more.
While most manufacturers source and process their materials through a complex network of suppliers, having one provider who can do it all can help cut out redundant processing steps and transportation costs. For example, here at Boston Centerless we can perform a myriad of valuable services beyond precision grinding, including:
By performing these operations all under one roof, we help customers save on transportation costs between facilities and significantly reduce lead times by eliminating unnecessary transport for additional processing. This also saves them the trouble of prepping materials for processing in-house, which saves time and allows them to utilize their machinery for more complex operations.
As demand ebbs and flows, it’s critical to have access to materials exactly when and where you need them. At the same time, managing a large stock of material on-site can be costly in the form of overhead, storage space, and personnel handling. That’s why we offer a variety of material management programs, like:
and more. These programs empower BC customers with the ability to get the quality material they need on demand, without the time, effort, and space that goes into managing material at their own facility.
Ready to scale? Find out if Boston Centerless is a good fit for your precision bar stock needs.