By this time you’ve formulated the questions you need to be asking in order to decide if a manufacturing partner makes sense for your company. This may have led you down the path toward a decision to outsource. Now, you might be feeling the sting of the difficulties that arise when it comes to finding a contract manufacturing (CM) partner.
Most companies identify a few main barriers they face when trying to select a CM partner: difficulty understanding the cost benefit, a lack of experience in finding and working with an outsourcing partner, and needing time to clean up operations before outsourcing them.
At ALTEX, we spend considerable time getting to know our prospective customers in order to understand their manufacturing needs and obstacles. We then provide solutions that demonstrate how we can best become a collaborative CM partner by alleviating the challenges you face at this point in the road. At this point in your journey, several of these pain points might begin to sound familiar:
Cost Pain – I’m already pressured to cut costs and don’t want to add on another.
There comes a point in the growth of every company when its leaders need to look at the economies of scale. If you consider the amount of financial resources dedicated to in-house production such as labor, soft labor, overhead, maintenance and repair and capital investments in machinery – outsourcing may be a major cost-savings opportunity.
Process Pain – I have a solid product, but don’t have the resources to spend on product development and design.
The right collaborative partner will provide the flexibility for you to move some or all production outside of the business in order to focus on research, design and innovation. During growth you may come to the realization you need to focus on what you do best and move some tasks offsite. If an engineer spends 80 percent of his or her time on the people, processes and production and only 20 percent on development, your company could be leaving quality improvement, product innovation and new sources of revenue on the production floor.
Time-Crunch Pain – I’m being challenged to get products to market more quickly. I don’t have time to look into outsourcing.
A good CM partner will provide solutions to improve processes to get to market faster. A qualified CM will have staff focused entirely on material and process innovations, and have established relationships with suppliers. They will create streamlined processes that work effectively and efficiently.
Outsourcing needs will be different for every company. Identifying and addressing pain points before they become tremendous problems will save you from a lot of frustration down the line. While the process of deciding on a CM partner can seem overwhelming, ALTEX aims to lessen the pain by collaborating with you on what your company needs the most.
For more information on beginning the outsourcing process be sure to download our Outsourcing 101 whitepaper.
1-800-783-2589
customerservice@altexengineered.com
