Sometimes the little things can slow down a project with your contract manufacturer. When production slows down, it can be frustrating when all they needed was some general information that you didn’t originally provide. Whether your manufacturer struggles with finding the right contact, or waiting on a response, it wastes valuable time on both ends. The solution involves making information accessible for your manufacturer from the beginning, but it can be hard to know what they need until you have guidelines. That’s why we created this checklist to help you reduce order entry stops with your contract manufacturer.
Free Customer Order Checklist Download
How to Reduce Order Entry Stops with Your Contract Manufacturer
Review Estimate Notes
Make sure your manufacturer has everything needed to move forward with your estimate, which includes paint approval, tooling and fixture charges with lead times, and any miscellaneous exceptions.
PO Requirements
Review that your PO has the following:
- Delivery dates
- Quantity breaks specified on pricing supplied by your manufacturer (Orders are run through production based on those approved quantity breaks, so you can’t take a higher quantity break than the order quantity)
Also, each line on the PO needs:
- A revision level
- Inspection requirements (either first article or Level 1, 2, or 3 PPAP requirements)
Engineering Requirements
Finally, make sure you’re providing your contract manufacturer’s engineers with all the models and prints for your project. Also, include component models and prints for assemblies/weldments. Some customers give us access to a private database/webpage, but simply providing the current prints in any form can prevent your project from slowing down.
Also, provide contact information for the engineer on your team that’s working on this project. It will give your manufacturer’s engineer someone to quickly contact with questions or changes as they pop up. Otherwise, it gets hard to move forward with the project until they are able to get approval from the right person.
These are the main factors that will prevent order entry stops with your contract manufacturer. To make your job easier, and help you quickly move your order through to production, we’ve provided all this information in the customer order checklist below. Please check that out, and let us know if you have any questions. Also, contact us today if you need help with your own industrial project.