Can Industrial Wire Baskets Improve Your Bottom Line?

April 14, 2015 | Custom Wire Baskets

Can industrial ire baskets improve your bottom line?For manufacturers, every day can be a struggle to find ways to stay in the black. Manufacturing can get very expensive, especially when trying to ensure that your manufacturing process is 100 percent compliant with the ocean of regulations covering worker safety, emissions, and paperwork filing.

Discovering ways to keep expenses down and profits up is a major challenge, but not an impossible one. There are many ways to improve your bottom line, but what does this have to do with industrial wire baskets?

Actually, using the right industrial wire basket for your parts washing/finishing processes can help to improve your bottom line.

How?

Here are a few ways in which the right industrial basket can improve your bottom line:

Time Savings on the Manufacturing Line

Every manufacturer should hate the dreaded word “bottleneck.” When one late-stage process takes an extra-long time to finish compared to the rest of the manufacturing process and other parts are piling up on the production line behind you, you know you have wasted production potential on your hands.

There are generally two ways to handle a production bottleneck:

  1. Create Multiple Stations for Handling the Slow Process. If the process is slow because of some unavoidable delay, then the manufacturer can handle the problem by adding more stations/machines for that process, similar to the way that adding more lanes of traffic to a road alleviates traffic congestion.
  2. Find Ways to Streamline the Slow Process. Some processes have inefficiencies built into them that can be removed or altered to make the process faster. Doing this alleviates the bottleneck by speeding parts through more quickly.

When the first option is too expensive or impractical for the long term, a well-optimized custom wire basket design can help with streamlining a production process. One way in which a basket can streamline a production process is by providing what Marlin Steel likes to call “cradle to grave” processing.

For example, say that a particular process requires your parts be placed in a basket that can survive extra high temperatures for heat-treating/curing, and another process that requires the use of an aqueous solution to lift debris and carry it away from the part(s) being finished. Using two baskets that are specialized for each process is well and good, but requires time to move parts between the two baskets.

Using a basket built to withstand both processes allows for parts to be moved more quickly from one process since you’ll be able to skip the added process of loading and unloading one type of basket for another.

Making More Efficient Use of Your Factory Floor

Free up your factory carrying-cost with the help of Marlin SteelSpeaking of only having to use one basket to handle the entire parts finishing process, another way that using the right industrial steel wire basket can improve your bottom line is by freeing up space on your factory floor for more important things such as more production capacity.

Using multiple baskets for a single type of part effectively doubles the amount of floor space you have to dedicate to storing baskets. After all, when the baskets aren’t actively being used, they still have to go somewhere, preferably a place close by on the jobsite where workers can reach them on short notice.

However, replacing two or more kinds of baskets with one that can survive all of the processes in a single go without needing replacement can cut your storage space requirement by half. Making it so that the baskets can neatly stack or nest provides even further savings on floor space.

With more space that you can dedicate to production, you’ll be able get more made each day to keep up with the demands of your clients.

Fewer Reorders of Baskets

One major problem with cheap commodity baskets from overseas manufacturers is that they tend to be, well, cheaply made. From the use of inferior parts to a reliance on inaccurate manual bending techniques, a commodity basket has any number of flaws that can lead to it breaking sooner rather than later.

For example, say that a commodity basket was made from cheap plain steel instead of stainless steel, even though it is to be used in a caustic wash process. After just a few parts washing cycles, the chemicals in the cleaning process would start eating away at the outer layer of the plain steel, causing it to corrode and deform quickly.

A stainless steel basket, on the other hand, could resist repeated exposure to the same caustic chemicals for thousands of uses without becoming corroded.

When cheap baskets break, your company is left holding the bill, having to order a new basket quickly to replace the one that was destroyed. Think of it this way, if one basket lasts six months at a price of $100, and another basket cost $300 and lasted five years, which one would actually cost you more over time? Over the course of five years, the “cheap” basket would actually cost your company $1,000 because of the amount of replacements you would have to order, while the other basket would only cost you $300, less than a third of the cost over time.

Using a better basket saves your company money in the long run, improving your bottom line.

Learn more about how the right custom steel wire basket can improve your production today. You can contact one of our mechanical engineers here.

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