The perfect match: Finding the right supplier
Aaron Johnson, VP of marketing and customer strategy, Accumold, highlights the importance of a collaborative and healthy relationship with your chosen supplier.
As we began the New Year, few could have predicted the landscape change that we would all be dealing with six months later. Since then, much has been written about the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on health, society, politics, and the economy. There were times as most of the leading economies in the world went into lockdown when there seemed to be huge and unprecedented uncertainty, and the situation seemed a little unreal. But as communities, we are nothing if not resilient, and now in July there is light at the end of the tunnel, and attention is full square on recovery.
At Accumold, we remained fully operational throughout the lockdown, and we worked closely with our customers to maintain continuity of service. Accumold is the only micro molding company in North America to be able to claim to be truly vertically integrated, and at times like this that has proved to be vital. One thing Covid-19 has laid bare is the fragility of supply chains, and also the fragility of relying on third parties for service or supply. As we control mold building, micro molding, validation, volume production, and automated assembly all under one roof, we were able to maintain absolute control.
What we found interesting in the lockdown is that innovation didn’t stop. Indeed, we noticed a spike in customers presenting us with projects that had been side-lined for whatever reason, and which as they had a little more time to take stock, they had brought back to life. Some of these new products and components are truly amazing, and in many instances, we proved what was thought to be impossible to manufacture, that in fact we could find a way.
As a manufacturer in normal times, we receive a lot of business from companies that have been told by other precision and micro molders that their products are not viable to manufacture. This is because we have an over 30-year pedigree pioneering the art and science of micro molding, and this means that we are able to push the boundaries of what is deemed possible. As we all move out of lockdown now, and with the economy licking its wounds, the manufacturers that will succeed will be those that continue to innovate, and as such we are getting more and more enquiries now from organizations that recognize our realistic and pragmatic solutions-oriented approach to micro molding.
When you boil it all down, what most if not all companies working in the area of micro molding need is to enter into a truly collaborative healthy partnership relationship with their chosen supplier as early in the product development process as possible. This is because it is the micro molder that understands the vagaries of the process, and an innate understanding of the rules of Design for Micro Molding (DfMM) are vital to mitigate the production of sub-optimal parts and costly and timely design reiterations.
It is this I think that explains the robustness of our backlog today. In times of crisis, customers regroup and analyze their supply chain and their partners, and to come back stronger they need to be able to rely on the experience and know-how of veterans in the space that can allow them to capture market share through innovation.