Where do you find that specialized manufacturer that can produce your product components? Here is a backdoor way.
Edited Transcript:
Mark Brinkerhoff: Often, one of the tasks we have to address (in fact, almost in every project) is where is a good manufacturer for this difficult part. Not all parts are difficult to fabricate, but some are extremely difficult. So I will give you an example of how we like to find onshore or offshore manufacturers.
So this particular product I will talk about is an antenna system. It's used for the cellular networks that we all enjoy with our smartphones and such. What it does is it communicates from one location to another via microwave.
The design has a radio and a parabolic dish. Inside the dish is a device that captures signals. Signals travel in both directions through this device in and out.
The accuracy of that part is important for this part. And many people do this with die casting, which is very expensive because it's a big dish. It's about two and a half feet in diameter. And it must be accurate within a small tolerance, plus or minus two-thousandths of an inch.
There's a parabolic control curve in here, and now we need to find a big dish that makes that form that can be produced at a reasonable cost. So we called many forming companies for dish shapes like this and found that most wouldn't even quote it. It's just too difficult for them.
So what we did was we went to a manufacturer's site that has a machine that can produce this. It's a spinning-forming machine. They often make kitchen bowls, stainless steel bowls, and things that are round and spun accurately. So we found out who made the best machine to do that.
Then we called them up and said, "All right, who shows the use of your machine like nobody else? Who are you very proud of to be an owner of your piece of equipment?" And they said, "Oh, that's obvious. Our best customer is a place in Pennsylvania that makes helicopter parts." What? Helicopter parts. It's true. There's a place in Pennsylvania that makes a lot of our military helicopter parts, and they're extremely accurate, and they do it. They're all programmable.
So by finding the manufacturer of the equipment that produces that particular shape and sheet metal and asking them who their favorite customer was, we found an excellent source for manufacturing these parts.
