Bob's Design Case Study - Stays Competitive with Overseas Manufacturers

The Business Challenge

Attention to detail and continuous manufacturing process improvements led Bob’s Design Engineering, Inc. to a lucrative contract producing components for a Fortune 100 electronics company a year and a half ago. Another development enabled the company to keep the contract when it recently came up for rebid, repelling stiff competition from a supplier in Southeast Asia.

The contract is for the manufacture of a high-price sub assembly needed by an American company that normally would have been sourced in Asia. Most of the assembly is machined from various grades of aluminum; some parts are made from stainless steel. The components range in size from parts that can fit into the palm of your hand to a plate that requires a 72-inch milling capability.

A former employee of the customer complicated the rebid process. That person took a position with a competitor supplier in Southeast Asia. This gave the competition inside knowledge of Bob’s Design Engineering’s production methods and costs. “We already had a proven track record and benchmark machine, tooling, and labor costs for manufacturing these parts,” says Jim O’Leary, Tool Engineer at Bob’s Design Engineering. “I had to come up with a way to reduce my costs and still remain profitable to make sure we could compete with Southeast Asia. “When we started looking at shop productivity factors, we realized that we were under-utilizing our equipment,” O’Leary notes.

“We had a lot of unutilized machining capacity that was leading to higher unit costs than necessary. We also had excellent holding capability and were using high-quality cutting tools, so we had to look elsewhere to reduce costs while retaining profitability.” After some research, O’Leary discovered VoluMill™, and realized that it could eliminate the weak link in their production process.