Time-to-Market the Key for Radical Bike Designer—Christini AWD
In the highly competitive custom bike market, always having something fresh—a new twist on gearing or braking—and getting that advantage to market quickly are critical to growth and survival. Something really new is a competitive advantage only for as long as you alone have it.
Truly new ideas are often the offspring of frustration, and when Steve Christini, out mountain biking in the rain, kept losing traction, frustration bore this idea: If Off-Roaders, those charging across creek beds and countryside in all-wheel-drive (AWD) vehicles, aren’t hampered by bad weather (the worse seemingly the better), why not bikers? Why not AWD mountain bikes?
And as Christini was an engineering student at the time, the dictates of convention and reality (no one else had successfully tried AWD for bikes, or thought of it, or thought it necessary, or had come up with a workable design, etc.), failed to come into play. So, the question still persisted: Why not, indeed?
The entrepreneuring begins
A few years later, Christini and Mike Dunn, fellow engineer, inventor, co-founder and now vice president of product development, Christini All Wheel Mountain Bikes, have a very hot, much-sought-after biking product.
The patented radical design works like this: The bike incorporates a rigid, light-weight drive system within the frame of the bike. A secondary set of gears is mounted to the rear wheel. Once activated by a "shift-on-the-fly" clutch, power is transmitted via a hollow shaft through the frame and down the fork to the front wheel. The result is an AWD system that provides instantaneous power transfer while still providing a full steering range.
Christini is now negotiating with several major bike manufacturers to incorporate all-wheel-drive into their bike lines.
The tough part - manufacturing
Getting to this spot wasn’t all that easy. When Christini and Dunn formalized the design for their all wheel drive mountain bike, they immediately faced a major problem: neither had experience working with suppliers of the machining services required to manufacture the precision gearing components of their radical drive system. Initially, they used the Yellow Pages to locate local suppliers, which worked to a degree but left them with no means to measure whether they were paying a reasonable price and/or receiving the highest quality.
The two then tapped MFG.com’s Web-based supply chain network. MFG.com provides comprehensive online sourcing for custom manufacturing services and intelligently matches buyer requirements with optimal suppliers. The system also provides sophisticated, easy-to-use technology for managing the sourcing process, collaborating, performing due diligence and establishing a private network of preferred vendors. Buyers post RFQs at no cost, and suppliers quote for business that meets their expertise and capacity.
According to Dunn, from the very first the company was up against a wall, making final design changes to the drive system with the largest bike show in North America only 11 days away. A superior presence at the annual event was critical to the success of the start-up company.
"Our main concern then was time," says Dunn, "and we knew we were running out. It was summer, and our go-to suppliers in Allentown and Philadelphia were booked solid. So we had to look outside—and fast. We posted our designs on MFG.com, and the very same day quotes began to come in. The next day, we found the one job shop that matched our skill and capacity criteria. Superior Machine Inc. (New Carlisle, IN) worked over the weekend to get our job done. Turnaround was six days. This single initiative on MFG.com proved crucial to our success."
Dunn reports that as a result of using MFG.com, they now have an established network of nine to 12 preferred suppliers from across the country—from South Carolina, to Chicago, to Idaho, to California—and the base continues to grow. They also have been able to refine their cost structure by finding and using more efficient suppliers. Jobs, for example, that once carried a high per-piece price for machining now cost significantly less per piece—without sacrificing quality and delivery, simply by finding better suppliers.
"One of the slickest things about MFG.com," Dunn says, "is being able to get our drawings out on the Web with the RFQ. This way when you select a supplier and make an initial call, he’s already reviewed the drawing and is up to speed. This certainly accelerates and enhances buyer/supplier communication."
The fun part
Dunn says that after three years they continue to use MFG.com, especially for the more difficult, complex machining jobs—as well as to evolve and to enrich their preferred supplier network. And sales are moving along nicely: from 175 bikes last year to a projected 500 bikes this year.
"I seriously doubt that we could have surmounted all the hurdles in getting this business up and running without MFG.com and the Internet. We went from two guys with no experience dealing with suppliers to where we have a solid supplier base machining up to 27 different part numbers across the entire country. Which allows us to concentrate on what we do best, redesigning, refining and improving our product—not searching for the right shop to make it."
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