Life in Globalization-------My Evolving Understanding of Globalization(2)

As I have gradually acheived the 1st objective, I have also seen opportunities for myself , which is my 2nd objective, I am making effort to transofrm these opportunies to real business operations. I would like to share my thought here with people who are interested


1)Let your single-piece prototye made with the same quality but 1/3 of the cost in States. The cost advantage of the outsourcing mode has mainly been seen under a relatively large volume purchase, which actually is also applicable to small volume purchase or even single piece purchase. It is especially true for the prototyping making in the industry. Here is a case I experienced that can draw a good comparison: half years ago we made a new design of a product, before going into production tooling directly, we would like to make a prototype of that design to test the functionality and geometrical fitness. Our purchasing manager sent out the inquiry to the prototyping company in the States to quote for CNC machining prototyping as he always did since it was just a single piece manufacturing. The quotation came back with $1876 for the 7 piece set. I decided to make an attempt to get quotation from offshore as soon as he gave me this number. I was lucky enough to find a bunch of prototyping factories and I selected one after talking their director.They came back to me with an unanticipated professional quotation(neat and detailed) showing a more surprising price $285, which accompanied with a shorter lead time 7 days(compared to the 10~20 days) and free international delivery. "Let's do it, $285", I said to the purchasing manager. The arrival of this prototype made of aluminum 6061 eliminated our last concern, the quality and workmanship. Every piece was nicely wrapped in the blister package and they were done exact to our specifications in the drawings, including the tiny geometric features even us didn't care too much about. It was from this case that I saw this underexplored market----outsourcing the prototyping making. Although I am not the front-runner to explore this market, I know it still has potential since it is far from as much outsourced as the Volume Purchase. And it does have a big price advantage while providing comparable quality, which matters a lot for those medium and small companies with tighter budgets. This is also attractive for a lot students and professors in engineering schools who want to make prototypes for their projects.


2)Let some professionals in the Far East accomplish the Engineering Drawings, 3D models, Kinematical analysis,reverse engineering,CAD Animation and even more sophisticated engineering planning&design at your full satisfaction with low cost. Thanks to the constant advancing of Internet Technology, the application of Web 2.0, IM etc, the transfer of such e-products as well as the communications during the service process becomes commercially convenient and acheivable. Of course I am not the 1st guy who saw this opportunity, there are already some front-runners engaging in this type of business, provding a platform for professionals who are able to provide such engineering services and companies who are looking for such service providers to meet and deal. The atlanta based http://www.mfg.com/ is one of those. They concentrate on providing a platform for all manufacturing-related services and products, with the majority of registered suppliers from Mainland China.


However, compared to the prevalence of outsourcing strategy used in the mass production, People and Companies in States are still not used to outsourcing such engineering services as well as small batch products such as prototypes and customized manufacture parts, which actually can save considerable budgets for individuals or small/medium companies. Therefore, providing outsourcing solutions to satisfy the needs of engineering services and small batch productions is becoming one of the focuses for outsourcing professionals and companies, which in turn could largely benefit the service users financially.