Known for its high-quality plastic products, VMT Plastic has been expanding its service offering towards assembly over the recent years. In addition to wanting to gain a better foothold, this move is motivated by the desire to help customers with solving their problems.
“VMT Plastic has always been something of an engineering company,” says Sales Manager Ville Mäkinen. “We have always liked brainstorming and planning ways of helping our customers with finding solutions to their problems.”
When it comes to assembly, it is extremely important to know the customer’s operating environment and understand where the product, final assembly, or component assembly is going. Most assembly works are quite simple, which is one reason why it is worthwhile to outsource them.
“The customer completing all assembly stages inhouse and storing the required components might not increase the value of their end product. From the perspective of VMT Plastic, things look different – being able to offer assembly services improves the added value of our own products too,” Mäkinen says.
Extensive partnership is reflected in the Avant Tecno fuel tank
VMT Plastic can help their customers extensively in component procurement, competitive tendering, and planning as well, known collectively as sourcing. One customer making use of the broad service offering is the Finnish multi-functional loader maker Avant Tecno.
At first, VMT Plastic only manufactured a fuel tank for Avant Tecno. The tank cap had a key lock mechanism, and the vehicle itself had its own key. This two-key system sounded unnecessarily complicated to Mäkinen.
“We proposed that we could take our partnership further and source a new cap for them. The cap was also serialised to be usable with the cabin key, thus getting rid of one of the keys. So, we built an assembly component for our customer that was fully customised to their needs,” Mäkinen summarises.
Avant Tecno was also able to reduce their overgrown inventory with the extended partnership.
“If you have a thousand products in store with ten attached components each, you need a massive warehouse. Multiply this by the number of products you have, and your inventory is bound to balloon. With our assistance, the customer was able to remove excessive components from their facilities, which impacts their inventory budget too,” Mäkinen reports.
Assembly works to ensure customer satisfaction
By outsourcing the assembly stage, the customer is thus able to focus their core competencies on their specific product without having to spend time and resources on the for them less important process of putting components together. Taking over the assembly process also eliminates any challenges the customer may have had in combining the components with the plastic product made by VMT Plastic.
“When we combine the required components ourselves, we can solve any issues in an agile way as part of our own production process. This allows us to get right to the root of the problem, ensuring that the customer receives a fully functional product,” Mäkinen points out.
“It thus makes sense, even from a quality control perspective, to combine all components as early as possible before shipping products to the customer.”
Good communication is the foundation of effective partnerships
Mäkinen encourages customers to make use of VMT Plastic in product development as well.
“The customer may be developing something like a fuel tank, and they are trying to come up with a suitable attachment component. Instead of spending time on this, they could just let us handle the problem,” Mäkinen says.
“It is important that information travels well between us and the customer. When the threshold for discussions is low, problems rarely appear.”
Partnership projects are particularly pleasant for Mäkinen, who sees himself as a customer service operator more than anything else.
“Our partnership with a customer deepens when we can submit more complete assemblies and get the opportunity to do our work in the best possible way at the same time.”
Read more about our partnership with Avant Tecno.