Background

We received a composite busbar manufacturing order from a Lithium ion battery manufacturer customer of ours. The busbar that had to be produced were dissimilar materials. Nickel and Copper.

The project sounded simple - Cut the two materials using a laser cutting machine and weld them together using a laser weld but it was not. Our client had previously tried to cut the materials using a laser but at a cost that they could not afford for iterations they were trying to achieve.

Customer Goals

• Produce the part with least number of iterations

• Part had to be produced at lowest possible cost as this is a prototype

• The part should meet their Quality Criteria

Challenge

The customer was unable to find a vendor with a Laser welding machine across India that would weld dissimilar metals and thickness of material they wanted to use. They had been in talks with vendors across west and south India, since 45 days, but to no avail.

As welding dissimilar metals of small thickness using a laser is not very common, not many vendors will have the machine capability for this. The metals being welded should be prepared and should be welded with extreme precision to achieve a good weld, bond and strength.

Solution

At Procurabl, our vendor teams are always working to build a solid vendor database. We have an access to 1 Million manufacturers across India. Of which we have onboarded 150 custom manufacturers onto our network. These are the best of the best. We not only maintain a database, but also extract 50 data points from such vendors to verify them and predict the capabilities to match them with the requirements. Super easy for us!

Our operations team was able to list best vendors for laser cutting and laser welding for the project using our indexed vendor database. Our Engineering team spoke to each of the vendors, briefed them about what we were trying to achieve and made sure the project was well translated to our vendors. We then requested them for quotes and lead times respectively. Upon receiving the quotes, our team sent out the best 2 quotes for each one of the processes to our client to choose from.

We did a sample run for both of these vendors to make sure our client’s requirements were met. The sample run was a success and our client were able to choose the best quote for their project. We also provided the customer with quality certificates for them to ensure that their end of quality criteria are being met.

Result

We achieved an overall cost saving of 35%

for this order with respect to the last few orders this customer had carried out in the past.

Doing a sample run helped us, help the customer understand the intricacies of quality management of such an order.

Manufacturing custom parts has never been easy for start-ups. it is quite a task. With smaller team size and fewer resources that can manage projects for procurement and supply chain, many times, companies come to a stage where they feel they have no option but to try vendors outside of India.

With Procurabl, this problem is solved. With our verified and distributed manufacturing network, we can provide a solution to your problem and take care of your procurement needs.

Have a similar requirement? Contact us!