Supply Chain Management at EB Industries

Welding often occurs towards the end of the production cycle of a product. Individual parts are manufactured or procured, assembled and welded, and then inspected and tested. They are then passed on for further assembly, integration into a larger component, or packaged and shipped to the end user.

It can be extremely cost effective to have the company towards the end of the production cycle that’s doing the welding perform and/or manage the remaining processing on either side of that welding process. This is the essence of the supply chain management value that EB Industries can add to your project.

When Does Outsourcing Your Supply Chain Make Sense?

When shipping costs can be lowered

Shipping expenses can add up. We have the capability to do many additional services in-house, from inspection and testing to machining and additional assembly work. All of this keeps your parts in one location, which lowers shipping costs and eliminates transit time. Any services that we outsource and manage ourselves are in close proximity to our Farmingdale, NY location, which heavily reduces the shipping costs. We work with a number of trusted partners in our immediate area that can perform a range of additional services as needed, allowing us to set up a supply chain segment that we can locally control.

When you need augmented staffing

Your company’s staff might skew heavily towards engineering and product development and lack the capability for production, proper material procurement, or a certified quality control inspection. It costs companies salaries and compensation packages as well as potential travel costs to hire staff to manage an entire supply chain. We have this capability in-house and can serve as a personnel nexus for your project. In cases like this, you benefit from not only reduced shipping, but reduced payroll, with no loss of oversight as our staff will keep you apprised of all developments.

When JIT isn’t feasible and you require an “in-stock” situation

Just-In-Time manufacturing is an excellent way to reduce inventory overhead, but in some instances, JIT isn’t responsive enough. This can result in delays and missed deliveries, which ultimately can result in fines from your end customer or a loss of business and revenue. EB Industries has warehousing and shipping capabilities such that we can maintain either a stock of your parts or its essential components, which allows us to process your product rapidly and turn weeks or months of waiting to potentially days.

When specific specifications have to be met

Aerospace products and medical devices are often required to be manufactured completely under the rubric of a particular standard. In aerospace, that standard is AS9100D / ISO9001:2015; for medical devices, it’s ISO 13485:2016. These standards control every step of a product’s lifecycle, and dealing with suppliers that aren’t certified adds additional inspection, paperwork and expense. Further, your company might be designing to ISO 13485, but unable to produce the part under that specification. EB Industries is certified to the aforementioned specifications and more, including proprietary specifications from major OEMs, and can perform work on your parts to those specifications. EB Industries can also provide all the documentation needed to prove that your parts are within the specification. We are certified to and have processed thousands of parts under various industry, customer and process specifications.

When your company wants to focus

Depending on the direction of your company, managing the supply chain of your product might be out of the scope of what your company does best. Resources and attention placed on procurement, assembly, tracking shipments, certification documentation and other day-to-day aspects of manufacturing might be better used on research and development or marketing, or a host of other activities that are essential to your business. In this situation, EB Industries can act as a contract manufacturer for your product, handling all aspects of the supply chain, from in the door to back out of it.

Services We Can Provide to Build Your Supply Chain

We offer pre and post-weld services that can be combined to build a custom supply chain for your project.

In-house Services

  • Pre inspection (dimensional and cleanliness) of parts
  • Heat treating (limited on size)
  • Vacuum baking to 10-2 Torr with Argon or Nitrogen backfill
  • Cleaning (ultrasonic)
  • Assembly (per the print or trained by customer)
  • Metallography services (cross and 3D specimen
  • Manual machining (milling, turning, grinding)
  • Mass spectrometer leak testing to 10-8 cc He/sec
  • Gross leak testing (with fluorinert) to 10-5
  • Visual / 3D microscopic inspection to 1000X
  • Special / custom packaging
  • Warehousing

Outside Vendor services

  • CNC machining (multi-axes milling, turning, grinding)
  • Non-destructive testing (NDT) including
  • Liquid / dye penetrants (LP)
  • Magnetic Particle (MP)
  • Ultrasonic Testing (UT)
  • Radiographic / X-Ray (RT)
  • 3D Computed Tomography (CT)
  • High energy 2D & 3D X-Ray Scanning
  • High temperature heat treat of large parts
  • Passivation
  • Material (metal) procurement
  • Physical testing – burst, tensile, hardness

Supply Chain Management Use Cases

Case 1. Often a part requires extensive additional testing after welding, and many of our customers have us manage this aspect of the production cycle β€” it is a natural fit.

We receive the parts from the customer, weld them, and then perform visual inspection, helium leak testing, etc. Once we’re satisfied with the quality of the welds, we move them to the next link of the supply chain for whatever additional testing is required, such as dye penetrant inspection or radiographic inspection, and then pack up the fully tested parts and ship them either back to the customer or to the next stage of the supply chain. All documentation of parts and test results is sent to the appropriate parties for full traceability, should that become necessary.

Case 2. We routinely handle pre-weld processing of parts. Typically, a part might come in for welding that requires pre-weld heat treatment. We arrange this, then weld the parts and perform whatever post weld processing might be needed, and ship the parts back to the customer. We function in this capacity, as a completed stage of manufacturing when the parties involved do not have production facilities or current sources for certain processes, which happens commonly with organizations that are developing instrumentation or equipment like NASA as well as smaller companies that don’t want to be bothered with handling this.

Case 3. Pre-weld processing, in some cases, turns into the making of the parts to be welded. We have coordinated the machining of initial components, inspected and welded them, then further tested the finished parts before shipping them back to the customer. We’ve also managed the procurement of the materials needed for machining.

Case 4. We can coordinate supply chains involving multiple sources for parts as well as multiple additional machining and testing processes, with all activity centering around our Farmingdale facility. For one particular medical OEM, we receive the majority of components directly from them, but we also procure another part that is made by a local stamping house, and weld all these together then perform inspection and testing per AQL sampling. These parts are then sent out for passivation which we provide our own POs for and handle ourselves. Further, there is a third component that requires no welding, rather assembly with a pneumatic press, that we accomplish in-house, and then this component is hand delivered to a local shop that performs sinker EDM on it. This component is then inspected yet again, carefully kitted and packaged and shipped back to the customer. All of this work is done IAW ISO 13485:2016, and the quantities involved are in the thousands per week.