The struggles involved with the pandemic and Brexit combined, has led to increased material costs to to reduced availability in the supply chain, and has also seen an increase in shipping costs.
This is where Chartway can come into its own, as we offer a UK based stock-holding service at our base in the West Midlands, so we can secure your stock in bulk to ensure you always have stock available to call off.
As well as the convenience of calling off stock from the UK, it can also prove to be a cost cutting tool due to the principle of “economy of scale”. By being able to commit to more material, and share machine setup costs over more parts, we are able to decrease selling prices at higher volumes.
A lot of our business comes from scheduled accounts, where we manufacture (either offshore from our facility in Asia, or in the UK) based on yearly forecasts, store stock at our own faciliity, and then schedule deliveries into our customers. With items coming from Asia, we always aim to have an agreed minimum stock quantity in the UK, a quantity on the water, and a quantity still on the machine, to ensure stock is always available to suit our customers’ requirements.
Case Study – Bulk manufacture for stock-holding
We have recently started a project with a long standing customer of ours, who normally places monthly orders to accomade their customer’s demands at that time.
By analysing the data, we could see that although orders were somewhat varied, over the course of the year numerous items were over 15,000 pieces per annum so we offered our stock holding option.
On just the first 6 items alone quoted in the past 2 weeks, we have been able to save our customer over 30% on their piece price, and have begun manufacture of the bulk amount to begin their stock holding agreement.