Pertronic Industries

The client need

Bruce Simpson, Pertronic’s Production Manager & Mechanical Design Engineer, needed to make continual changes and improvements to their fire alarm cabinets. Some years back they were often faced with the supplier remark “your parts require a lot of production setup for the small quantities you order – this makes the parts expensive”. Then they had a visit from Paul at Metco who cast a different light on it…

The Metco experience in the client’s words

“Paul listened to our needs and brainstormed with us on the whiteboard as to how to change our designs to make them easier to produce – saving us money.

He then made some prototypes and we mostly went with his solutions. That worked great for a while… until we came under market price pressure on our products. We had to re-look at our highest cost times quantity items and go back to the drawing board. Again Paul came up with some clever outside-the-square ideas to shave off costs.

One scheme was forming the hinges as part of the cabinet body and door. This saved us fitting and adjusting separate hinges. Another improvement was substituting formed threaded holes instead of using press-inserted threaded studs (one machine operation instead of two – with one being part manual). This saved us a lot more cost.

Unlike alternative sources, we can order the quantities we want, with direct communication for quick changes and problem fixing.

With Chinese imports, you have to order inconveniently high quantities, pay up before shipment and then find space to store it all. If there are QA problems, you’re stuck with them, and any design changes have to wait years till old stock is used up. Communication with suppliers is often frustrating because you only get to talk to sales KPI-pressured ‘middle-men’ and not the actual production engineers on the job.

With much better service, Metco can actually do some things cheaper.

It’s great being able to talk direct to relevant staff for production, delivery, and design issues.

We’ve had the challenge of needing continual design changes and called on Paul’s brains every time. He’s very responsive and often here within an hour.

We see someone from Metco virtually every day, unlike other companies that we hardly ever see.”