Sometimes for one reason or another, manufacturers or assemblers find themselves in need of a large quantity of parts on an emergency deadline. Maybe the original parts you ordered were defective, maybe they never showed up, maybe you were shipped the wrong thing – emergencies in the supply chain are an unfortunate eventuality if you’re in the industry. I’m sure our readers have stories of their own on the subject, someone pulled an incredible late night, working into the morning hours, trying to meet an approaching deadline. We’ll share a particularly relevant one from our end, and explain how we solved the problem.
“One afternoon, a customer called around 3:00pm because he needed 100,000 pieces to some pretty tight tolerances (0.022” thick PTFE, to +/- 0.002”) that day. Mind you, 0.022” PTFE isn’t a very common thickness, and we only had one roll in stock, with no current tooling for the particular dimensions and tolerances he requested. I told him that I’d keep our tooling department over that night to make the tool, and ship it to him as soon as we could. He called the next day asking after the order – I informed him that we had only been able to get about 88,000 out of the roll. He said that would be fine, and to ship them next-day air. When he received them the next day, he told us they were perfect; then he asked for 10 million more.”
Now this is a great story for us at New Process for several reasons: it highlights our substantial high-speed capabilities, and demonstrates how the commitment to serving our customers well pays off – we’re still making those parts for that customer to this day. None of this would be possible without our high-speed horizontal stamping machines. The throughput of the high speed machines also keeps the prices down for our customers, because of the quantity we can run in such a short time – anywhere from 25-50,000 pieces/hour, rather than the average 5-7000 for regular machines. We have 13 high speed machines, with up to a 2.5” OD capability, which affords us great flexibility to fulfill high volume orders for those emergency situations. We value our high speed department pretty highly, because it offers great benefits to our customers in terms of accelerated timelines, and offers us opportunities at business that we simply wouldn’t be able to provide otherwise.