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You could just send your part CAM
files to one of those online services to just make the parts and ship them to
you. Sounds pretty high tech. Sexy. New school. No humans involved.
Or you
could send them to a company that actively involves its human engineering
talent to add value for you, the customer. Old school. And worth it!
(<-- Imagine the cost of both the material lost by turning and
the machine time to remove it if this were made from barstock of the greatest
diameter.)
Two of the major contributors of a
part's cost are material and machining time.
Value engineering at Fairchild
Auto-Mated involves engineers evaluating each part to seek ways to
reduce these cost factors.
Imagine, engineers getting involved
in evaluating your part before production begins.
Decidedly Old School. And decidedly
worth it.
The valve component shown above was
presented to Fairchild made as one piece carved out of oversize barstock in an
single piece.
Fairchild's engineers studied the
design, application, and function.
They determined that this part would
be less expensive to produce as two separate items assembled and staked
together to form this single part.
This design eliminated the costly
stock removal of large diameter (expensive) stainless steel, and reduced
the amount of (expensive) stainless steel chips produced to generate the stem.
There was no need for the disk
portion of this part to be stainless, and so less expensive and more machinable
brass was selected for this part of the component.
What was the pay off for value
engineering versus the "download the file over the internet and have it go
straight into production" process path?
(At $1.00 saved per part, the Customer saved one of these
for every 100 parts they purchased thanks to Value Engineering. -->)
The
savings identified by Fairchild's value engineers resulted in a total cost
savings of over $1.00 per part.
End
result for the customer: $48,000 in savings the first year…
If you just want to email your part
file to someone and have them make it with no humans involved, well, that is
certainly your perogative.
But if you would like to have the
benefit of a value engineering teams design review that can find, say, $1.00
per part in cost savings- then you probably ought to make a different decision.
Old school shops like Fairchild
have been able to survive through all of the ups and downs in the market-
because they continue to add real value and identify real savings for
their customers.
And in quantities of 50,000 or more
per release, that value engineering can add up to real money.
How do you know your part is
optimized for production?
How do you identify real cost
savings besides just having jobs rebid?
Do you have a process to involve
your suppliers in value engineering?
Or do you just go with lowest bidder
for the part as drawn on the print?
Why?
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Re: How Value Engineering Saves Money on Machined Part Costs
