Customer Experiences
Small and medium sized manufacturers of engineered products are often faced with challenges of improving product design, enhancing the quality of products they offer, lowering costs, introducing new products into their markets, and raising profits. These companies may not have the resources for both personnel and financial investments to address these urgent needs.
Markets that Lodestar serves specializes in solving problems for small and medium sized manufacturing companies both onshore and offshore. Here are some examples of problem types and Lodestar solutions.
Customer Experiences
Turnkey Custom Manufacturing Customer Experience
Customer Problem — Lodestar’s customer was facing issues with its present storage box design and sourcing.
Lodestar Solutions included — Key design changes to structural members to reduce weight, improve strength, and reduce cost.
Created a unique shutter door design. Developed the supply chain, including identifying source for lightweight high strength composite panels. Solutions also included establishing production processes and quality controls.
Results delivered — enabled customer to focus production resources on assembling this bolt-on storage system, raising throughput by 25%. Reduced costs approximately 20% resulting in substantial increase in net margins.
Product Custom Upgrde Customer Experience
Customer Problem — Lodestar’s customer, a reputed North American manufacturer of vacuum pumps for use in oil fields, was facing a loss of sales and market share due to outdated pump design and quality problems.
Lodestar Solutions included — conducting root cause analysis to identify components and areas where design and manufacturing improvement was needed using the DMAIC model. Developed an innovative design to prevent catastrophic pump failures due to entry of liquid in the pump, a problem that prior manufacturers in the industry had not solved.
Results delivered — increased pump performance by over 50% as measured by flow rate.
Re-Design & Supply Chain Customer Experience
Customer Problem — Lodestar’s customer, a medium sized trailer/bulk transport manufacturer specializing in producing custom trailers was faced aging product designs resulting in low production throughput, inventory build-up, inability to quicly address market fluctions in demand of product type and low margins.
Lodestar Solutions included — Lodestar designing, developing, and manufacturing a configurable common frame. This allowed bolting on components and sub-assemblies so customer could create three different product types. This new assembly developed by Lodestar enabled the customer to quickly customize a product type based on market demand without having to hold finished inventory.
Results delivered — solution enabled the customer to focus production resources on assembling bolt-on systems which raised throughput by over 15%. Also, reduced manufacturing costs approximately 20%, with significantly improved higher product quality, resulting in substantial increase in net margin.