How Vendor Relationships Support Our Precision Metal Fabrication
Century-Tywood’s customers trust us for our remarkable precision and high standards of quality. However, achieving customer satisfaction isn’t always something we accomplish on our own. We partner with a highly vetted network of vendors to support us in the following services:
Casting
Chromate plating
Heat treating
Machining
Passivation
Painting
Photo etching
Powder coating
Zinc plating
Building and maintaining positive relationships with a diverse group of vendors is crucial to our custom sheet metal fabrication solutions.
Our Process for Vetting Suppliers
The Century-Tywood team is extremely pleased with the vendors we’ve surrounded ourselves with, but we certainly aren’t closed off to new partnerships. We’re consistently seeking out new contacts that handle capabilities that our legacy vendors may not have. That way, when a customer asks for a process that a vendor within our current network does not have, we have options in our back pocket to outsource this capability.
When we search for new suppliers to add to our network, we consider the following:
Can they handle this process?
What is it going to cost? (We need to know this as early as possible, so we can quote it out to our own customers.)
What time frame do they need to complete the process?
How Positive Vendor Relationships Benefit Customers
As the saying goes, “It’s all about who you know.” Our long-running relationships with vendors have granted us benefits that shops that just started working with them may not experience. Let’s dive into some of the main value-adds of working with a shop with a reliable vendor network.
Timeliness
Because we’ve worked with many of our vendors for 20 to 30 years, our long-lasting relationships allow us room for negotiation when it comes to timing. A quick phone call to a supplier can result in our project moving up their list of priorities. It’s not something we do all the time, but it comes in handy when we need to.
We’ve experienced situations firsthand in which our suppliers have swept in and saved the day. Most notably, on the rare occasion our fabrication process takes longer than expected, we’ve had vendors turn a part around overnight with no added cost. As a result, our customers receive their parts on time and don’t incur additional costs for expedited services.
Price Flexibility
Just as our relationships help us with timing, they’re also advantageous in pricing. If we’re unable to meet a customer’s asking price, we will negotiate with our vendors to see if they would be willing to decrease the cost on their end. As a result, we end up advocating for our customers’ budgetary needs to get them the best price possible.
Consistent (and Excellent) Results
The longer we work with a vendor, the more we understand their strongest qualities. Being attuned to the results we can expect from each of our suppliers ensures the highest quality outsourced solutions.
For instance, we established excellent working relationships with several different painters. We learned from experience that one of our painting partners is exceptional at capturing intricate details, so we outsource to this vendor when we receive a quote for parts with more complex painting features. As a result, our customers are pleased with every painting project from this vendor.
Quality
We perform quality control protocols on the parts that we’ve outsourced. Though they almost always come back flawless, due to our rigorous vendor vetting processes, we want to ensure that parts arrive to our customers exactly as promised. Our talented suppliers contribute to our extremely low rejection rate of 0.1%.
For one of our vendors, whose quality we’ve counted on for years, we don’t feel the need to perform our own quality control testing. This vendor will plate the parts and ship them directly to our customer, who will then send those parts right into production. Experiencing perfect results from this vendor for a long time has cemented our (and our customer’s) trust in them to produce exceptional, reject-free finishing services.
Mutually Beneficial Partnership
At Century-Tywood, our positive outcomes are not just a result of the talented team members in our Holliston, MA facility. Our vendors are crucial to our success, and our trust in their processes has allowed us to foster a mutually beneficial relationship between them and our customers:
Our customers benefit from the high-quality, on-time parts and customer service we provide.
Our vendors benefit from the consistent business we give them over the years.
We provide a better service to our customers due to the strong relationships we’ve forged with our vendors.
If you’re seeking solutions from a precision sheet metal fabricator with a reliable network of vendors that allow us to respond to customer needs with quality and timeliness, request a quote to get started with Century-Tywood.