Help Your Customers’ Engineers, Help Yourself

In this story, I highlight how Parametric USA is leveraging finite element analysis (FEA) as a means to provide a more sophisticated level of design for manufacturability (DFM) consultation for its customers. The goal is not just to refine customers’ new product designs to speed, simplify and lower the cost of machining work, but to also build solid, long-term relationships with its customers’ engineers.

To that end, Parametric USA creates summary infographics like the one above for its customers’ engineers that clearly show how their efforts in streamlining part designs via DFM have saved their companies time and money on recent projects. The shop encourages them to share this information with their managers. This gives the engineers personal wins in their workplaces by clearly demonstrating their added value while providing leverage in negotiating higher wages, earning more respect within their companies and so on. In turn, Parametric USA has found that those engineers are more likely to approach the shop early in a new-product design cycle and recommend to their companies that they use its machining and DFM services.

In other words, this creates a win-win-win situation.