PROCESS & SOURCING STRATEGY
Ask a die caster and you’ll get die casting. Ask me and you’ll get the answer.
For OEMs and product companies specifying precision components
The situation
You have a part — more likely a platform of parts — and a decision that will follow you for the life of the program: how should this be made, and who should make it?
Every source of advice you can call has a stake in the answer. The process vendor sells their process. The supplier quotes what their floor can run. The rep steers you to whoever pays them. And the decision is getting harder: the process that made sense at 5,000 units breaks at 500,000, the supplier who carried you for a decade is aging out, and the parts themselves keep getting smaller, tighter, and more consolidated.
I run no plant and represent no one. I’ve made parts for a living in metal injection molding, die casting, powder metallurgy, metal additive, thixomolding, investment casting, and precision machining — and I don’t care which one wins. That’s the point.
The work
Process strategy
The right manufacturing route for your platform, decided in the right order. The answer to “how should this be made” comes from a sequence of questions, asked before anyone quotes anything: Is the part in the process’s range at all — size, weight, wall sections? Which features can’t be made net-shape and what does the finishing route look like? (Hybrid answers are normal: mold the geometry, machine the critical bores. Vendors rarely offer them, because each vendor only owns half the answer.) Does the volume justify the tooling — the line where a molded route beats a cast one, and where both lose to the mill? And what’s actually being bought today — because conversion economics live in the material you’re throwing away, not the part you’re keeping. A part carved from a blank near its weight is a different conversation than one carved from a blank five times its weight.
Then the answer defends itself: volume thresholds where it flips, design changes that would open a cheaper route, consolidation that turns four parts into one.
Sourcing strategy
Who should actually make it. The real capability landscape for your process and volume, at home and offshore — from someone who has run plants on both sides of the Pacific and can tell you honestly which parts should come home and which shouldn’t.
Supplier assessment
Whether they’re any good. Capability, capacity, and quality-system reality checked on their floor, not in their brochure. I’ve qualified suppliers, audited them, and been audited as one. I know what a healthy operation looks like and what a dressed-up one looks like.
What multi-process honesty sounds like
A client once came to me shopping for a MIM supplier. The process was decided; they just wanted names. Except it wasn’t a MIM part. The geometry could be pressed — and the properties they were chasing, the whole reason they assumed they needed MIM, could be reached with conventional press-and-sinter powder metallurgy run through high-temperature sintering. Simpler tooling. Cheaper part. The properties they needed. No MIM house was ever going to tell them that — every one they called would have quoted it. Ask a vendor “which of you should make this?” and you get a quote. Ask someone with no stake in the answer, and you sometimes find out you asked the wrong question. That’s the conversation this service is made of.
The deliverable
A process recommendation with the reasoning shown, a qualified supplier shortlist, and the economics to defend both to your program team. Built at platform level — this is a strategy engagement, not a quoting service.
After the assessment
Most engagements end with the recommendation and the shortlist. When you want it carried through, I stay on for the sourcing itself — supplier visits, capability assessment on the floor, and support through qualification until parts are running.
A note on scope
The natural unit of work here is a platform, a product family, or a resourcing event — a funded decision with an executive attached. I’ll take a single-part question when it’s the right question; more often, one part turns out to be the first article of a bigger conversation.