Lean processes bring real value and profit improvement to most businesses. However specialist companies, like this customer in the aerospace business, often have many legacy products which can obstruct the creation of Lean Value Streams. Outsourcing their legacy products to SMS Technologies yielded cost savings, improved customer service and made way for the Value Streams. We even looked after the hard graft of transferring all the engineering data.

Many companies make good use of sales demonstration stock as an important selling tool. However, management and maintenance of demo stock does not fit readily within the skill set required in Sales Administration. This customer solved a serious problem by outsourcing all management of demo stock to SMS Technologies.

Product innovation involves much more than just clever design. Production is all-important and often requires just as much innovation as the design process. Outsourcing within the UK is in many instances now becoming recognized as less expensive in terms of total procurement cost than Far Eastern manufacture.

The production of spare parts and sub-assemblies frequently conflicts with the manufacture of main catalogue products, resulting in unacceptable uncertainties and delays in the availability of critical spares. By outsourcing spares to SMS Technologies, this priority clash is eliminated and customer service improved.

Outsourcing converts what were believed to be fixed costs into variable costs. Customers of SMS Technologies become more adaptable to the vagaries of customer demand. Forget the limited thinking behind ‘overhead recovery’. In the end, there’s no such thing as fixed costs; you just need some imagination in order to be profitable.

Bringing a brand new product into manufacture has its own particular demands and stresses which can be helped by outsourcing difficult legacy products from the existing catalogue. This customer eliminated the disruptive ‘squeaky wheels’ of the old products by outsourcing them to SMS Technologies. This decision enabled the team to focus fully on introducing innovative processes for the new product.