Are you a member of the National Tooling & Machining Association?

[Amark Engineering/Manufac]

www.ntma.org/EWEB/dynamicpage.aspx?webcode=AboutNTMA

I am not promoting it. I really just found it and wondered if any of you had a membership. If you do please tell us what you think of the organization.

I know that we are all in the same boat. We need more good paying work. Some of us desperately at this point. I wonder how we can ban together some how to make it better. In our industry it is common practice to not share anything that might give our competition an edge over us. Well I think we have all seen the low ball pricing that cut throat competition has given us and we know that if we try to compete then we will just be working broke.
Does anyone have any Ideas on how we can make it better?

 

[choppertod]

Yes have some integrity and stop bidding a job so low that your not even covering the material cost.

 

[AdvancedMfg]

Lowest Price can hurt you later..

Right now it's hard to stay alive, but as I read this I thought of an example to share...

Back around 2002 when things were tough, I worked at a shop that was struggling also. Work was hard to come by and you had to basically give work away just to get it.

Well an average sized manufacturer was looking to cut costs as we all see especially now. They had dozens of suppliers and decided that they would put everything out for bid and cut their supply line down to 5 shops.

All the machine shops quoted these machined parts down to nothing. The end result was that 5 shops got all of their work, but the catch was they were under contract for 5 years at that price.

This moral of the story was, that these 5 shops received more work then they were doing at the time for that customer and survived. The problem was, I was told personally by 3 of the suppliers after the first year when things turned around they spent the next 4 years paying for the work. I was told by one owner that he was basically sending a $20 bill on top of every part.

Labor goes up annually with raises, utilities always goes up, insurance, and all overhead. Not to mention the biggest factor was capacity. With all of that work in house under the low contract rate, it was hard to fit in better paying work over the years. So you had loss of potential work.

So really unless every stays the course and operates with Trade Integrity to their product, in the end things really can affect you later.

Mike in MN