Case Studies

International Industrial Procurement Consultants Case Studies

In all our case studies we leave out the names of the clients involved simply because we respect their commercial confidentiality and our intent is only to demonstrate what we have achieved in the past. References are available from some of our clients upon request.

International Sourcing:

When a contact of ours ‘F’ in Mexico lost a major client he had several state of the art machine tools sat idle looking for work and he was concerned that he would have to lay off some of the personnel he’d trained and employed for the last 18 months. He asked us if we could help and we promised to go to our client base and see what we could find.

We had created a list of ‘F’ capabilities some time back and we had them update that and we sent it out to several of our clients who we thought might be interested. One of the advantages of this company was that it was based in Mexico, had low labor rates and had little overhead so the parts they could machine were very cost effective.

One of our clients, ‘P’ was fast running out of capacity and the CEO was considering investing in new machine tools, unfortunately his Houston based company has a lot of trouble recruiting and retaining skilled machinists, so while he had the capital to invest in new machines, he did not have the access to the workforce he required, unless he actively poached skilled workers from other companies, something he was loathe to do.

Having read the capability list of ‘F’, ‘P’ reviewed the parts it machined and was able to identify families of parts it could usefully sub-contract to Mexico and utilize it’s existing machines on the capacity increases it was experiencing.

Over a period of several months, ‘P’, ‘F’ and Va-aP worked together to transfer the parts indentified and to get up to full scale manufacture, Va-aP’s consultant routinely visited both facilities and made sure there was good communication and that the transfer of parts went smoothly.

What’s in it for Va-aP?

This example demonstrates that we have clients and contacts in several markets and we often work with old clients and in this example we were able to help two established clients resolve their problems by connecting them to one another.

Va-aP receives a commission on the sales generated by ‘F’ and continues to work with both ‘F’ and ‘P’. The CEO of ‘P’ was able to divert the funds he’d ear marked for new machine tools to a new product line that was in the process of being developed and was able to bring that to market a lot faster than planned, partly due to the ability to have parts sub-contracted, partly due to being able to redirect key personnel not now involved in making parts, and of course Va-aP was there to find a market and we now earn commission on those sales too.