What One Buyer Did When They Lost an Important Supplier and Needed To Get Parts Made - Quick
Manufacturing start-ups share a number of common characteristics: a dream, imagination, energy, hope. They also share some daunting reality checks: money, customers and suppliers. In essence, how to get this idea from a sketch on paper to a finished part in a customer's product. Here's what one small entrepreneur is doing to address at least one major hurdle — finding good, quality suppliers
Makio Sato is a manufacturing engineer at one of the largest aerospace firms in the U.S. Which means he knows a thing or two about working in big corporate manufacturing.
More important, it means Sato's more than an "idea" guy. Sato understands design, but equally importantly he knows how to take a design and get it made. Which seems like a minor point in this day and age of DFM (design for manufacturability), DFA (design for assembly), DFRM (design for remanufacturing), DFO (design for obsolesce) and all the other Design-Fors one can think of.
What's driving Sato these days is a "side" business, Drive Road Race Products, of which he is president and founder, which is more "virtual" than real and more commonly found on the Internet than a street map.
Designed for abuse
One of the parts that Sato's company produces is used primarily by road racing and autocross enthusiasts — hardcore racers who push the limits of their vehicles and routinely redefine abuse. These are drivers whose success often depends on how well their vehicles (and they themselves) stand up to extreme punishment.
"They put roll cages in these cars, for very good reason," Sato says. "The cage serves two functions. One, obviously, is driver safety. The other is to build additional stiffness into the vehicle frame. Which is where our product comes in. The part's a relatively small, simple brace made of 6061-T6 aluminum produced on a five-axis CNC machining center. It stiffens up a part or parts of the race car."
His Master Cylinder Brace, for example, mounts onto the inboard side of the shock tower housing and prevents the brake master cylinder from moving forward (caused by flex in the firewall and brake booster) when excessive pressure is applied to the brakes under extreme driving conditions. The flexing of the firewall causes the brakes to feel "mushy." The Master Cylinder Brace greatly improves sensitivity and brake firmness, therefore reducing brake fade.
Sato admits that the market for his products is limited by the size of the road race market. However, he notes that as in all things auto racing these days, interest and participation in motorsports have been enjoying remarkable growth. Further, Sato notes that there are numerous iterations of his brace yet to be developed for an almost unlimited number of vehicles and vehicle types.
Sato makes a further important distinction: From the start, he says, he had no intention of building Drive Road Race Products into a typical manufacturing business (product design, production, assembly, inventory, fulfillment and so on). "It's not my goal to open a machine shop," he says, "to invest in capital equipment, employees, brick and mortar. My strength is in designing products; the other disciplines can be acquired. I want to keep this operation as virtual as possible."
And for a period this business model (even as a side business), worked very well. Sato's designs went out, the machined parts came back in, Sato did some light assembly and delivered the parts to customers. His company was beginning to become pretty well known. His components began showing up in cars on tracks and road courses. Cars on display at auto shows devoted to road course racing showed off his product.
Sato recalls that a business that was started pretty much "to see where it might take him" was beginning to take off. Things were running pretty smoothly; Drive Road Race Products, while remaining pretty much "virtual," was gaining momentum.
Until a key supplier notified Sato that he no longer wanted to machine the brace.
The supplier search begins
This turn of events came as a surprise to Sato. The part, he explains, was not a very complex machining job. The only "tricky" aspect is a time-consuming cutout that involves a small diameter cutter and a rather tight radius. "This may have taken more time than he wanted to invest," Sato says, "but outside of the radius issue, the job was pretty routine".
Be that as it may, Sato was now left with orders coming in and a supplier to be found. He considered the options — searching industry directories, phone directories, networking through associates — all of these appeared daunting in their time consumption and offered little more chance of being effective than random hit-or-miss.
He then turned to the Internet and keyed in "custom manufacturing" on Google and up came MFG.com, an interactive Web service enabling manufacturers to buy and sell custom manufacturing services. Buyers post RFQs at no cost; suppliers quote for business that meets their expertise and capacity.
"I had no idea such services existed," Sato says. "MFG.com seemed almost designed just for me, or guys like me. Entrepreneurs. Guys with an idea looking to find that all-important link to a good supplier."
Sato says he toured the site and then posted an RFQ for the aluminum brace. Within seven days he had received 14 or more inquiries, literally from across the country and at bid rates that ran the spectrum — from very high to the suspiciously low. And each time an inquiry came in, he says, a MFG.com staff member would call and ask if there was anything they could do to assist — go through the inquiry in detail, answer questions, clarify points and so on.
"The site was so easy," Sato says, "that even with all the personal follow up and communication, I found I could really handle the transactions myself."
Supplier selection
Sato indicates that all the usual variables — quality, price, delivery, reputation — played a part in the supplier selection process. However, in this particular case, an "intangible" element came into play.
"I had reduced the suppliers to two and was at the point of deciding on one, when the phone rang," he says, "and it was one of the suppliers under consideration."
The supplier had called to check to see if Sato had gotten the quote and if there were any questions he could answer. As the conversation continued, Sato became convinced that this was the supplier he should use. "After all," he says, "here was a supplier, following up, communicating with me — before he had the job. This showed me that he had a real interest in me and my business. So, I awarded him the job — just like that."
Another positive in this decision was that the supplier was literally just a couple of hours down the road, which meant that communication between the two companies, which started on such a strong note, would continue so. And further, as Sato's business continues to grow, his product offerings increase and his client base expands, Sato can easily travel to his supplier to work out design and manufacturing issues (DFM, DFA, DFO, etc.) as well as confer up front on product R&D in person.
"MFG.com has already played an important role in how I manage this business," Sato says. "And as my needs change, you can bet I'll turn to them again and again. It's slick, fast, and my [sourcing] begins and ends right on my desk top."
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