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I'm really proud to manufacture in America.
Well, the future is bright and certainly I think we're all sort of focused
on our low-beams right now with the current economy but if you turn on the high beams
we need the world two-thirds of the world's population is coming into their time as consumer economies.
So, strategy number one--again I don't have to tell
my fellow manufacturers--strategy number one is to look for
cost-effective
and high-quality ways to
innovate your customers' product.
Secondly,
think about--
as many manufacturers do--
think about your customers end-product what can I do? Can I add another component, can I
components together? Can I look at my customers' assembly process and say,
t"What if, instead of just assembling the cables,
I assembled a subassembly?" You know, would my customer listen to that.
And I think we all want to,and I'm sure many do exploit the fact that we have proximity to many of these customers. Again, here in our own experience we have proximity
to
to forty or fifty of the world's leading corporations. So we have that advantage
of being able to talk to our customer and anticipate what his needs are in the future.
As we were readying our next-generation of products for launch,
we took a look at the time that it would take for us to bring those products to market and
the costs and the quality and we made a decision to bring a manufacturing here to the U.S.,
to a local manufacturer not far from our corporate offices. It's enabled us to collaborate much
more effectively, it's reduced our cycle time, it's made getting samples faster,
it's made the quality that much better and there have been benefits that have exceeded our
expectations.
The stuff we make
today can be used on a bench top in San Francisco tomorrow.
So there's three or four
biotech standards in the United States: San Diego, San Francisco, Boston,
and if you can be
down there with product delivered immediately, they call up and can deliver the next day, it's really important.
If you're trying to put import the stuff
from overseas, there'll be containers sitting on the water for thirty days,
maybe caught in customs, maybe they've ordered the wrong stuff not even on the container, maybe they've got too much stuff,
so we have a quality advantage, we have a market advantage, we have a logistics advantage in the cost of getting the stuff to the domestic consumer,and it all works in our favor--our business is booming--we've done really, really well in the last several years.
Some companies want their manufacturing
very close to where the research and development and design it takes place. Other companies
for example in the solar industry, they want their final assembly close to where the customers
actually are. And some manufacturing, as you know, has become very capital-intensive,
so companies
want to take advantage of the highly-skilled workforce that is here.
You have a relationship where, if you pay for something
that if there's something runs afoul you can get reimbursed;
whereas, if you pay up-front for something that's offshore
it's very difficult to get reimbursed to get the problem fixed.
It's high quality instead of saving just a couple of pennies off into a few dollars
it's, in the long run, it's the savings to purchase products made in America that are high quality.
And finally, I would say,
it's almost a cultural trait--
you know--the American manufacturer.
We, in some sense, we've never lost those teenage years traits. I don't know if your hobby was sports or if it was hopping up cars or if it
was
plastic models or whatever it was,
I would say to each of us to exploit back our natural traitof experimentation,
innovation, and frankly--
I know it sounds trite--but good old-
fashioned American ingenuity.