Best Practices for Top-Tier Mold Makers
Mold making is a highly competitive business. Often companies are competing for numerous bids with prices that align with profit margins. However, this is not always enough to win.
The delivery date can be a huge factor for winning bids. Not only must these predicted dates be timely, but they must also be accurate. Accurate quotes require significant efforts and despite all of the work, winning bids are still minimal.
Survey results indicate that only 52% of the jobs respondents quoted were won. Then, once the bid is won, challenges continue to multiply. Between poor part designs, bottlenecks, complexity, changes, and so on create obstacles that affect profitability.
What Is Essential for Mold Makers to Remain Competitive?
Ensuring the quality of your molds and the resulting parts can help you stand out from other mold shops. How can you become even more competitive? Where should you focus? At a high level, it is about keeping customers happy. However, competitive advantage can be broken down into a few specific efforts.
Mold Quality
Ensuring the quality of your molds and the resulting parts can help you stand out from other mold shops. It gives customers a reason to do business with you. High quality helps you earn their loyalty because they know they'll be able to rely on you. However, injection molding is so complex, it is hard to predict exactly what will happen, so having the right systems and processes in place will help you catch problems as early as possible to ensure quality.
Cost
Cost is also critical. If you can keep your costs low, you can afford to be price competitive without compromising your profit margins. However, as with quality, you need to catch potential problems as early as possible to avoid expensive mold rework. Efficiency will also help keep development costs down.
Speed
Efficiency also helps you meet delivery dates. Customers desire short lead times, so removing bottlenecks will help you win more bids. Shorter cycle times also help. Shaving just a couple of seconds off can save your customer tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. That’s certainly a reason for a customer to want to work with you!
Market Share and Cycle Time
The more customers you win over, the bigger your market share, which will boost your visibility and reputation to help you win even more business.
To learn more, contact Geometric Solutions- your Siemens Digital Industries software partner.