Purchasing? Engineering? Marketing?

One of the bigger challenges I have at CNCROi.com is deciding on WHO to contact within a company regarding our services. Truth be told, we can help all three of these divisions and then some!

Purchasing

This is generally my default person to contact, they are in charge of finding sources that the company needs to continue to grow and prosper. They find the food to feed the beast and generate purchase orders that lead to a cheque down the line.

Engineering

Generally a department involved with designing, researching and making things, if they need something, they ask purchasing though many of the companies CNCROi.com has as customers deal directly with us via purchasing as well. Engineers make the CAD files that we use to generate quotes on projects from cutting to bending. They are just as creative as any other division, they just focus on what size bolts go in what sized holes while marketing focuses on selling what the machine does to customers.

Marketing

Responsible for promoting what the engineers come-up with and developing a plan to turn it into a profitable line, marketing generally is responsible for the visual “brand” of a company which goes across brochures and business cards to advertising and even SEO/SEM. They are responsible for creating the narrative that leads to companies purchasing products and services from their company.

Even in very large companies, there is a lot of cross-over between these departments, sometimes our foot in the door starts with sales which leads to marketing than engineering and other times, we do stuff with engineering that leads to marketing. Regardless, our services fulfill a need in every department, my job, is to find what we can do NOW to give them the biggest bang for the buck so our services can be used over and over again regardless of department.

What about the executive suite?

For smaller companies, we do work directly with the owner or manager of the business but for very big companies, I’m lucky if I get an introduction. Executives at fortune 500 companies are crazy busy which is why they hired professionals in purchasing, engineering and marketing to help spread the load. These are the people who you don’t get to formally meet until you’ve proven yourself lower down the food chain as they have the incredible responsibility to keep the ship floating and going in the right direction.

Price Points

Working with companies of all sizes is fun but the challenge always comes back to the cost of going CUSTOM. Take for instance the Wooden Big Wheels which I custom designed, laser cut and built-in the shop in my spare time.

How much would it cost to do this for a client? It depends on the application (display or actual use in playground), environment it will be in (wet, dry, hazardous), who will be driving it (weight and body size), scale, material preferences and the list goes on. All these things must be taken in account along with volume before anything is cut and ideally, even before it’s designed! We could just as easily have cut this out of flat titanium sheets as we could out of hardboard or foam or assembled it using skids.

If you told me you had a price point of 50$ per unit for these, we certainly wouldn’t be using over 250 pieces to build it with, maybe at that price we’d design it out of paper to be folded together but you’d have a hefty design and testing fee if you only wanted one. If you wanted a thousand, then there is a lot more room for a cardboard version using fewer pieces but with that unit count, I wouldn’t see you driving it anywhere soon.

Custom is great but unlike “off the production line” type of work we also do here, there is a lot more creativity required to pull a project off successfully and that’s fully reflected in the price. Just the above design alone, we could have easily overboard and engrave details into all the front facing parts with logos, decals and even introduce LED lighting etc… the more custom, the more money and time required.

That’s why its important to know your budget ahead of time, then you tell us the application and how much you have to spend and we’ll come-up with a solution to fit that need at that price points, with caveats of course. We can do just about anything in the CNCROi.com custom CNC shop except change the laws of physics, though we can make a cool award celebrating them.