ABSTRACT
I wouldn’t say that every detail had been worked through and resolved with regard to our move to the new location, but we had focused on the major problems and, for the most part, things were now running smoothly. I was proud of the team and happy with our new location. We were in an industrial area with a strong presence of machining and fabrication shops, which accounted for the large localized supply base. We now had a plating shop next door, a painting company across the street, and a machine tooling supplier within a block. I worked out a simple pricing structure with the plating shop, which allowed us to determine the plating costs we would incur and to include them directly into our quote instead of going through the internal effort with each RFQ (request for quotation), which specified plating, thereby necessitating subcontracting. So, we avoided the delay and administrative costs of sending out an RFQ to the plating company and receiving a price, then rolling it up in our quotation. This further reduced non-value-added work in the administrative area; better yet, it only took about thirty seconds to transport the parts to the plating shop. They promised us priority if we utilized them for most of our volume, further reducing our lead time and administrative costs to organize transportation.
