Maintaining inventory of what a customer needs for production, and nothing more, is a delicate and complicated balance. As inventory ages, it can depreciate to a level that no longer adds value for the producer. This is especially true in metal forming processes.
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For manufacturers who require a continuous flow of custom roll forming, late shipments and stock outages can negatively impact sales and make it difficult to compete in today’s global marketplace. To limit the possibility of such headaches, OEM often choose between multisourcing vs.[...]
Just roll forming isn’t very valuable to you. You can do just roll forming in-house. To be competitive, a manufacturer has to offer value throughout your supply chain, from beginning to end of the project.
While it's certainly niche, roll forming is still like any other metal manufacturing process. A little collaborative engineering and a lot of lean manufacturing practices equal mutual success.
The cost of completing a solar installation project continues to drop. Part of the reason is that component manufacturing changing from being outsourced to multiple suppliers to single sources.
Using “pull production” rather than “push production” -- meaning, using a demand-driven approach rather than a supply-driven approach -- is a manufacturing philosophy that’s existed for decades at this point. In an industry like metal roll forming, “pull production” means everything from raw[...]
Customers don't ask for much. All they want is the right product at the right price, delivered on time and free from defects. That doesn't seem unreasonable, but many manufacturers struggle to hit all four points simultaneously. Hitting all four on a consistent basis is harder still.
Kanban inventory management was developed in the 1950s by Taiichi Ohno, a Toyota executive. He took notice of the way supermarkets handle and replenish their inventory, and applied those strategies to the manufacturing process. Today, kanban is a major component of lean manufacturing[...]
A continuous improvement mindset encourages both initiation and implementation of changes to manufacturing processes to improve “customer delight” (our quality policy statement) and other measures of company performance. In Dahlstrom's case, manufacturing process improvement helps us offer both[...]
“Which metals will get cheaper?” It’s a question OEM customers are asking even more these days in light of the latest events in the Section 232 investigation of unfair imports.
