Why Spending on Quality Can Save Your Company Money

In almost any business, finding ways to save money is crucial to success. Keeping costs down helps keep manufacturers in the black. In pursuit of lower costs, many businesses do things such as purchase cheap materials or offshore their labor to foreign countries where labor costs are low.

However, sometimes, it is better to spend a little extra for higher quality now and save money in the long run.

How does spending more in the short run save money in the long term? Here are a couple of examples of how spending on quality can actually save your company money later on:

Replacement Costs

When assessing the cost of a basket order, it is important to look at the total cost of ownership over time, not just the initial cost.

For example, say that your company is preparing to order a load of baskets for an ultrasonic parts cleaning process so that you can ensure that your product has a perfect finish. You are comparing two different basket offers, offer 1 and offer 2:

• Offer 1 features a comprehensive design with a soft PVC coating, is made of corrosion-resistant stainless steel, and will minimize scratches to your parts.
• Offer 2 is made of cheaper plain steel, and does not have any kind of polymer coat, but costs half as much.

Here, the first offer is definitely the higher-quality option, but offer 2 is much more economical in the now.

However, while offer 2 looks cheaper on paper during the initial decision, it will end up costing far more than the higher-quality option over time.

Because plain steel is not corrosion-resistant, repeated exposure to nearly any aqueous solution would naturally cause the steel to degrade, requiring frequent replacement of the baskets over time. Additionally, as the baskets get damaged during the cleaning process, the chances of parts being adversely affected increases.

One Marlin Steel client actually faces a situation where they were having to replace their low-quality baskets every year because the material the baskets were made from couldn’t handle the salty sea air of their coastal factory location.

However, they kept reordering the same units over and over because they didn’t have the budget to spend more on a higher-quality material. All told, they ended up spending much more on constantly reordering the same ineffectual baskets than they would have if they had ordered baskets made from a corrosion-resistant material in the first place.

Production Time

Another problem with low quality components in a production process is that a low quality component might not meet production tolerances.

Cheap overseas labor tends to be much less exacting in meeting production tolerances than what you would get from someone using factory automation tools.

For example, say that your company were to order 100 units of a part from two different suppliers. One supplier uses automated equipment to ensure consistency for the parts they supply so that each one is within 1-2 millimeters for their size tolerance. This would ensure a nearly perfect usefulness rate for these parts.

The other supplier, however, uses manual labor to construct parts. The less exacting tolerance standards of the second supplier lead to differences of an inch between any two baskets, with some 25% of the order not being able to fit properly.

Unusable units have to be sent back to be remade, which wastes time. Worse yet, other parts may be damaged by the improper fit, requiring them to be reprocessed as well. This can add a significant amount of time to the production process, wasting labor and delaying your time to market.

Having to continuously rework or remake parts that are damaged by a low-quality container can really add up over time.

Between the costs of having to frequently replace low-quality parts washing baskets and the increased amount of parts rejections that occur when using such baskets, the true cost of ownership for a “cheap” basket will be much higher than that of a more expensive but higher-quality one.

Using a high-quality basket from the outset saves your company time and labor on the production line, and keeps replacement costs down.

Find out how you can get the best quality parts washing or materials handling basket for your application by reading the free guide available at the link below: