Plastics Fabrication

Direct Spend Category Management

Plastics Fabrication Strategic Sourcing Services from Corcentric

Corcentric’s Manufacturing Strategic Sourcing experts provide the market intelligence and procurement best practices to help companies reduce plastics fabrication costs.

Plastics Fabrication is a cost-effective manufacturing process, allowing the design and build of lightweight but strong products. Particularly when compared to metals fabrication, plastics fabrication as a direct material has a lower commodity market cost, and this among many other factors has made Plastics one of the most common material categories for manufacturing. But despite the inherent cost advantages of plastic, many companies struggle to reduce plastics fabrication costs sustainably, and implement strategic sourcing within the plastics fabrication category.

Corcentric can help.

Our in-house engineers, plastics fabrication category experts, and procurement practitioners have been performing plastics fabrication cost reduction and strategic sourcing events for decades. Where your internal procurement team may struggle to understand the cost drivers of every type of plastics fabrication, Corcentric’s Strategic Sourcing support team is well-versed in all the applications of plastics, including injection molding, blow molding, rotational molding, vacuum forming or thermoforming, laser cutting, die cutting, and machining. With our decades of market intelligence and in-house commodity subject matter experts, Corcentric can help you produce sustainable plastics fabrication cost reduction.

Beyond cost savings, companies who leverage Corcentric’s plastics fabrication strategic sourcing process realize many benefits, including:

Multiple-markets analysis for plastics fabrication based on your company’s overall manufacturing objectives
Visibility into the plastics fabrication supplier landscape for your company’s needs at market competitive costs
Greater pricing transparency and structure across your plastics fabrication supply base
Continuity of operations and transition planning support when needed to mitigate risk and maximize savings
Best-in-class agreements with strong Service Level Agreements with plastics fabricators

Let Corcentric’s strategic sourcing engineers and manufacturing experts improve your plastics fabrication category performance. Contact our plastics fabrication cost reduction experts today.

Plastics Market Expertise

Plastics Fabricators are generally the tier 1 or tier 2 suppliers of OEM/solution providers. They can also be found as tier 3 suppliers in more complex industries such as the aerospace & defense industry, providing plastic components and/or sub-assemblies to be included in final assemblies. Plastics Fabrication is also one of few spend categories where the pricing structure includes a product unit cost AND a tooling cost. For example, injection molded/vacuum formed/thermoformed parts will be quoted with a product unit cost, and a mold cost. The mold is unique to each part’s design, therefore suppliers quote in accordance with the part’s design complexity.

Plastics Fabrication Strategic Sourcing goes beyond requesting quotes for parts and includes negotiating tool ownership and tool maintenance policies, and all these factors contribute to potentially higher plastics fabrication costs. Companies struggle with Plastics Fabrication Strategic Sourcing in two key ways:

Plastics Fabrication Sourcing Strategy and Resources – Establishing the right plastics sourcing strategy, approaching the right markets, and ultimately selecting the right plastics fabrication suppliers are challenging tasks that require resources, time, market knowledge and expertise that companies may not have available on hand.
Plastics Fabrication Supplier Identification, Vetting and Selection – As plastic resins cost is closely tied to the market index fluctuations, there is not a lot of leverage for negotiations on raw material cost. Therefore, sourcing within the plastics fabrication space requires identifying low-cost labor suppliers with top of the line manufacturing technologies. Identifying plastics fabrication suppliers that fit this description, vetting them properly and making sure they are reliable (in terms of quality, capability to take on new business, and production capacity) in the long term is a particularly challenging task.