John:
Well, that's our niche for us for Fostermation is high-volume. We make a lot of pins-- millions-- and if we can relate that to the customers at a high-volume job shop that, “hey if you order bigger blankets or something like that off of one single PO, we can do releases for you. Cuts cost down, material tolling, and whatnot, lead times, for one. We can plan ahead more accordingly.” Just overall, it's better if some sort of consignment or blanket order is better for everybody I think if you know what you need or consume in a year.

Anthony:
It puts a better plan in place, I think and I mean, John hit a lot of the main points. Especially if we can plan and strategize the material required, what your requirements are. How many parts do you need a month? How many parts do you need in a year? We'll work with you and break that down. It also helps with the lead times from an availability standpoint. If you give us a PO, we might actually even already have parts stocked because we know you're anticipating those needs to where we can pull them off of the shelf and send them out immediately if necessary from a material standpoint. 

John:
There's a lot of price breaks, a lot of certain weight, and then you figure freight. Most time freight traveling across the country, wherever, one shipment is better than ten. You pay minimum regardless. There's a lot of minimum setup charges for material vendors because we have to get special drawn-wired. And we get it to plus or minus a thousand, down to a couple of tenths, so they gotta take the material and draw it down. So one setup fee for them if we know we want high-volume that's how much weight we need, we can order one time.

Anthony:
You can have it readily available, or we don't have to wait on the material if we have the material already on hand. That could cut down lead times drastically by anywhere from four to six weeks, if not longer.

John:
No, we could get it on a lot quicker if we know like we have the material in-house.

Anthony:
Four to six weeks.

John:
So we will be a lot quicker than four to six weeks.

Anthony:
Yeah i think another important aspect of it too to consider is high-volume is kind of like the standard standardization of the parts. You're using the same material, the same heat numbers. Your parts are being put on a machine. Whereas, they're not being set up and taken off. Less likely of risks or error of not meeting your specifications, easier traceability to track if there was to be an issue. I would also say from a high-volume standpoint, I'd actually say, believe it or not, it increases our own capacity because we're able to strategize, and schedule, and plan with our machines available. Jobs that are in-queue, or jobs that we're currently producing. It allows us to have a better figure of how many parts we can run for you and thus increasing our capacity standpoint.

John:
I think they're great, and I prefer more people to do them. At first, I hated them, just because of the startup with everything it was just-- We had to bring a lot of material in, it was just a headache, between our customers and everything. Because a lot of stuff's online, they'll send releases out. It's just hard to track, but now that we finally understand and it's been great. We're never late ever on any of these parts.

Anthony:
That's a really good point, actually. It is; we're meeting your deadlines.

John:
And they do like a draw. So say, a customer needs 20,000 pieces and on a regular basis on the shelf. They draw from us so that we ship. They order it, comes off of their other software, whatever they use, and then we get an email blast saying that they drop below 10,000. So they have a minimum of 10,000 pieces on the shelf. So they release a new order so then we build back up another 20,000 pieces. So now we have 30,000 on there and it draws back down kind of a thing. It's nice because we always have material on hand, tooling is always ordered, we know what to expect and with that, parts. They're done. They're out the door on time. I think more people should do it. Especially when you're ordering hundreds of thousands of pins. I mean, it's an easy thing. And that being said though, we do do small quantities as well. I mean I'm not like--

Anthony:
There's just a lot of advantages to larger, bigger runs and being able to plan it more efficiently.

John:
It's just to be more competitive. Higher-volume is better for us because we do have set up charges and everything and again, even our setup charges are minimal, it's the material minimums. They're tough to beat when high volume you can buy wire on a coil versus buying a little bundle. it's the same damn price.