When choosing an aluminum supplier quality of products, inventory levels to match your needs and the right pricing to be competitive in the market are all important services.
However, what many fabricators, manufacturers, OEM companies and even prototype developers fail to keep in mind is the fact that some aluminum suppliers offer additional services that are highly beneficial to many of their customers. Not understanding how these additional services can be used to save your business time, money and cost will lead to missed opportunities to streamline your manufacturing or fabrication process.
A good example of this is the variety of different applications that use aluminum round plate. By working through an example of how buying the plate from the aluminum supplier already cut and finished can save you money you have the option to compare what you are paying now to what you will be saving in the future.
Reduced Waste
Purchasing large sheets of plate from an aluminum supplier may have been the go-to option in the past. However, if those sheets are going to be cut into aluminum round plate, then there is a considerable amount of waste on the machining room floor once the process is completed.
While aluminum still retains a high recycle value, it takes time and money to have someone load up the scrap and process it for recycling. On top of that, if there is a problem with the cutting process any mistakes end up costing you in additional material costs. In fact, you may be over-ordering just to address these issues, which is also costing you money.
When you have the round plate cut, laser machined, water jet machined or processed through CNC machining you have no waste to pay for. All you will pay for is the number of rounds you ordered with the aluminum company handling the cost of any mistakes.
Less in Freight
Even with lightweight aluminum freight is charged the total weight on the load. By having the aluminum round plate cut at the aluminum supplier’s facility you are only paying for the freight on the parts you are going to need, not on the aluminum that will end up as recycled scrap.
While this may not seem like a big savings, for a large single order or frequent but smaller repeat orders this can be considerable savings over a year. As often just a few cents in the savings column per unit adds up to dramatic decreases in production costs over time, this is a very important consideration to keep in mind.
