Your customers are demanding more variety and shorter lead times. Ten years ago, 80% of your production was large runs of 10,000 meters or more. Today, 60% of your orders are for small batches of 500 meters or less. You’ve tried to adapt, but you’ve noticed that your profits have plummeted. Small batch orders seem to lose money no matter how much you charge for them.
This is the biggest challenge facing extrusion manufacturers today. The market is shifting from mass production to mass customization, but most extrusion equipment is still designed for long production runs of identical profiles.
The problem is changeover time. Every time you switch from one profile to another, you have to change the die, adjust the puller, recalibrate the saw, and fine-tune the cooling system. On a traditional extrusion line, this process takes 2-3 hours. For a small batch order that only takes 1 hour to produce, you spend more time changing over than you do actually producing.
This means your effective production capacity drops by 50% or more when you produce small batches. Your labor costs per ton skyrocket, and your equipment sits idle most of the time. Many manufacturers try to compensate by charging a premium for small orders, but this only drives customers to your competitors.
The solution is not to refuse small batch orders – it’s to reduce your changeover time dramatically. Tongzheng’s modular extrusion auxiliary systems are designed specifically for flexible manufacturing. Our equipment features recipe-based operation that allows operators to save and load production parameters for different profiles with a single touch.
With Tongzheng equipment, you can reduce your changeover time from 2 hours to just 15 minutes. This means you can run 8-10 different profiles per day instead of just 2-3. Small batch orders become profitable, and you can offer your customers shorter lead times and greater variety.
One of our customers increased their number of active products from 120 to over 350 after upgrading to our flexible systems. They were able to capture new business from customers who needed small batch orders, and their overall profitability increased by 22%.
If small batch orders are killing your profits, don’t blame your customers. The market is changing, and your equipment needs to change with it. Invest in flexible manufacturing solutions that allow you to profitably produce both large and small batches.
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