Maintaining a strong supply chain is vital to all businesses in the manufacturing and engineering industries. Relationships between companies along with customer satisfaction levels - strengthen with every transaction completed on time. Manufacturers come to rely on their trusted suppliers more and more. So what happens when your supply chain fails? Deadlines are missed and orders are dropped, leading to frustration and potential disaster for the manufacturer.
A building product manufacturer found itself in exactly this position last year, following the loss of a critical supplier in their industry. The customer was missing a huge amount of small - but crucial - plastic components. With an extensive and diverse catalogue of plastic products to fulfil and an expected lead time of around 6 months, they turned to Nottinghamshire-based Company S&S Plastics.
S&S Plastics investigated the catalogue of over 50 components and successfully project managed each one from Introduction of Tooling, through to main-stream production, finalising the programme within 12 weeks.
Managing Director Richard Munyard gives some insight into how S&S Plastics reduce production times: I think what sets us apart is the level of care we take with our tooling. We have very high standards in that regard - a lot of our tools are 25 years old and still manufacturing today. Replenishing tools can cost a great deal of production time, so by looking after our tools we can eliminate that part of the process and improve long-terms costs, which of course is a benefit that passes straight to the customer.
By keeping S&S Plastics as their ongoing supplier, the customer will enjoy the peace of mind of having stocks held at the production facility for delivery as needed.
The Customer explained We had a lot of customers counting on us, so it was enormously important that we found a new supplier within a very limited timeframe. Thankfully, S&S were able to bridge the gap in our supply chain, and we now have a stream of products at our disposal operating through a Kanban. They managed to reintroduce a cost-effective supply to us, while at the same time exceeding our expectations of product quality and turnaround time.
For more information on the respective companies, visit www.ssplastics.co.uk