Whether you have owned or managed a manufacturing facility for decades or are still in the design stage of creating your very first manufacturing facility, you need to know when it makes more sense to outsource all or part of your metal fabrication needs instead of doing it all in-house. Here are important ways your company can benefit from outsourcing fabrication, no matter how long your manufacturing company has been around. 

The Benefits of Outsourcing Fabrication at Existing Manufacturing Companies

If you are like many business owners, you may like the feeling of having every aspect of every product you create under your control, and you may shy away from outsourcing for this reason. However, a quality fabrication company will take all of your needs and desires into account when fabricating items for you, and you may end up wishing you had begun outsourcing fabrication long before you did. 

If the fabrication branch of your company is small, then the facility designated to fabrication is likely small as well. Therefore, when you have large orders for new clients or when a long-term clients places an especially large order, the limited fabrication ability of your company may lead to you not being able to fulfill those large orders as quickly as you wish you could. While those clients may have let those missed deadlines slide once or twice, if they become too frequent, it may lead to lost clients that could have helped you grow your business and increase your profits to an entirely new level. 

On the other hand, if you dedicated a large portion of your manufacturing facility to fabrication and invested in all of the equipment you needed to fill it and then realized that you don't have to perform nearly as much fabrication as you thought you would to fulfill customers' orders, then you have an entirely different problem. Not only do you have to perform regular, often-costly maintenance on all of your fabrication equipment, but you also have a large chunk of your facility space being occupied by the equipment. That space could be used to expand the rest of your entire manufacturing facility, which would allow you to fulfill orders even faster and take on new clients without having to worry as much about not being able to meet their often-tight production deadlines. 

The Benefits of Outsourcing Fabrication at a New Manufacturing Company

If you are still in the design stages of a new manufacturing company or already have the facility built, but have not invested in fabrication equipment or hired the employees to tackle fabrication, then you still have time to reconsider any current plans to fabricate in-house. As already mentioned, you may estimate the future fabrication needs of clients and end up with too much equipment and space dedicated to fabrication—or not enough. While neither is desirable, over-estimating your needs has more of a potential negative impact on your bottom line due to the space going to waste and a too-large investment in equipment that you may end up rarely using. 

However, the benefits of outsourcing fabrication don't end there. Training new employees will be a costly, and likely stressful, endeavor for your company, since the average cost of training a new employee can range from $5,500 to close to $10,000. Depending on how many fabrication employees you plan to hire and how long they stick around before needing to be replaced with other employees that continue to add to your training costs, the cash you save by simply outsourcing your fabrication can be immense. 

In addition, instead of having a period after you begin operations when even very experienced fabricators will need to get used to performing their jobs using equipment they may not be accustomed to using and simply learning how to navigate your fabrication area efficiently, the fabrication company you hire to meet your needs will have seasoned employees already used to their jobs and their facility ready to fulfill your orders; this can lead to your company not only being able to fulfill those first few customer orders much more quickly and efficiently, but also accurately and affordably. A few fabrication mistakes made when your company is new and just developing its reputation could lead to long-term disaster if word gets around that mistakes were made when producing products for those first few clients. 

There are many instances when it is just a better option for an existing business to begin outsourcing tasks and a new business to outsource them from the get-go, and that includes the choice to outsource fabrication. Keep these benefits of outsourcing fabrication in mind and contact a fabrication company like Suburban Welding & Steel LLC if you have additional questions about what they can do for you and your manufacturing facility.