No matter what the specific industry or application, designing and manufacturing products can be an expensive, time-consuming undertaking, so any opportunities for saving are usually welcome. To keep down costs, many companies consider contracting with a low-cost metal forming company. But doing so can lead to significant expenditures in the long run, not to mention added downtime and general stress.
Suppliers offering low-cost parts are typically able to do so by sacrificing quality, thereby failing to meet the strict standards you maintain in your own facilities and processes. While partnering with these companies may save you money in the short term, it’s important to fully understand the risks involved.
How Poor-Quality Suppliers Impact Your Business
There are three distinct ways in which working with a low-cost metal forming supplier can negatively impact your business, all stemming directly from the low-quality products they supply.
Increased Costs
Contracting with low-cost suppliers typically ends up costing more money in the long run. This can happen in a few different ways.
First, there are significant risks involved in accepting low-quality parts. If you receive a shipment and your own quality-check processes detect faults — whether the products are out of spec or are generally just poor quality — you will then have to remove, dispose of, and replenish those parts. These added production steps will cost you both time and money.
And low-quality parts that end up in your finished product can result in steep regulatory fines; in the worst-case scenario, these parts can cause your parts to malfunction, potentially injuring your customers and leading to lawsuits.
Damaged Reputation
Your customers are looking for quality and reliability — the two aspects of your products most likely to suffer when using low-cost, low-quality parts. Clients will definitely notice if your product is low-quality and will likely take their business elsewhere. And if a low-quality part leads to a safety incident or a recall, word can spread very quickly thanks to today’s social media landscape.
Lost Revenue
Working with low-cost suppliers often necessitates sending faulty parts back, leading to production delays and additional downtime. And damaged reputation, reduced market share, and drops in stock prices for public companies can all cut directly into your revenue.
Factors to Consider When Looking for a Supplier
Once you have a solid understanding of the ways partnering with low-quality metal forming companies can hurt your business, you should also know how to identify a reliable deep-drawn metal supplier. Keep in mind these five important factors:
- Supplier history and reputation
- Quality of product
- Reliability and flexibility of service
- Turnaround times
- Problem resolution process
There are other critical factors to keep in mind, but these will help you effectively weed out low-quality suppliers long before the final selection process.
Quality Assurance From Hudson Technologies
As an industry-leading deep drawn metal enclosure supplier with over 70 years of experience, Hudson Technologies understands how important it is that our products perform reliably. For this reason, we take great pains to ensure every part that leaves our facility is of the highest quality possible. All of our products are subjected to our robust quality assurance program.
Utilizing Kaizen and Six Sigma methodologies, we are constantly refining our processes and retraining our employees to develop new and existing skills. We also apply the Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP) framework to product design and development, establishing quality levels upfront. We practice statistical process control (SPC) for all manufacturing stages, and perform the majority of our machinery calibrations ourselves.
In addition, we proudly maintain a fleet of state-of-the-art quality-assurance equipment — almost 20 visual inspection systems and OGP Smartscope dimensional measurement systems. To ensure we stay ahead of the curve, our skilled staff of quality-assurance professionals is regularly trained in the newest best practices.
To learn more about how Hudson Technologies and our dedication to quality can help protect your reputation and bottom line, contact us today or schedule an in-person facility tour.
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