Is it worth betting on the cheapest offers?
Is it always worth choosing the lowest offered price for CNC production of a part? Have you considered all the pros and cons when it comes to the potential of a CNC manufacturing company? In this episode, Piotr Stańczyk - Vice President of the Polish company RADMOT - focuses on the many different aspects of what an offer actually includes. After all, it's not just the nominal value of producing a part, is it?
The price of a turned or milled part is influenced by many obvious factors, such as:
the price of the material
the machining cycle
the type of machinery and tools used
operator man-hours
complexity of the quality control process
In addition, the quotation does not always include a quote for appropriate packaging or the cost of safe transport. The price of CNC services is also influenced by batch size and annual volumes. These last two factors particularly influence our approach to the prices offered. Furthermore, the price of milled or turned parts is also influenced by the fact of production for stock and, alternatively, production directly for a given shipment.
Such a multitude of parameters can cause errors in the offer preparation process. This is what can happen with the lowest price offers. Consequently, it is difficult to achieve full customer satisfaction under such conditions. Often, in such situations, it is back to price negotiations for subsequent production batches, which means additional wasted time and ultimately worse conditions for the CNC service.
It is also worth considering the fact that always choosing the lowest price means spreading your parts portfolio across many different CNC sub-suppliers. This results in a large amount of work for logistics, co-operation, management and ongoing communication with many entities. In such ‘fragmented’ conditions, the customer will also never become a key customer for a particular supplier. And this can lead to problems with quality or timeliness.