One of the things that took me a long time to realize as I learned manufacturing from the outside is that your company is your product. It’s not what you make, it’s how you make it—that’s what’s valuable to your customers. Other shops buy the same materials and the same machines as you. Your product is your entire business; it’s the way you coordinate work, the way you communicate with your customer, the way you come up with how to make things. It’s how your shop floor is laid out, how you train people, and your culture.
Customers buy from you because it’s convenient. They don’t have to commit to buying their own machine or learning how to make a part. It’s valuable to them and the primary reason they pay you money to do work.
Products are evolving faster, and your customers are evolving with them. While this is good for us as a civilization, you’ll have to continue to innovate and find better ways to run your shop to survive. You need to be more flexible than previous generations of fabricators.
What Flexibility Means to Custom Fabricators
Flexibility is about being able to absorb changes quickly. The change in what your customers expect from you must match the way you work. Prototyping work requires a lot of communication with your customer’s engineers. Higher-volume work requires coordination with buyers to plan blanket order releases. And high-precision work requires meticulous recordkeeping. Each of these requires a different group of people to work differently.
The way you work has to match your processes, rules, culture, tools, and software—the systems you rely on. If your shop uses a kanban supermarket system for inventory but your customers want lot-controlled traceability, something will break.
Growing Pains
It’s not just your customers and their products changing; you’re changing too. As you grow, the cost of coordinating everyone goes up. Whether you realize it or not, every group of people has to pay a tax as the group gets larger.
When your shop was younger, you had fewer machines and routings were simpler. Adjustments were easier. You were smaller, had fewer people. Coordination was simple. Standing in one spot, you could see everything, and you talked to everyone daily.
As your headcount and number of jobs grow, the amount of coordination and communication needed increases exponentially. It’s no longer obvious what to do next or how to do it. You might not know when to purchase a material or from whom.
Organizations grow until their systems start to break down. At that point, they either adapt by changing the way they work, communicate, and coordinate, or they shrink back down to a point where things stabilize again. It feels like the monkey bars. You don’t want to let go of what worked before, but to move forward, you have to add new things you didn’t need before. If you don’t ever let go of the past, it will hold you back. You have to remove things that served you well before but are no longer relevant.
Pour lire l'article complet : What products do custom metal fabricators sell? (thefabricator.com)
