Reverse Engineering Run Amok: Chinese Gearbox Manufacturing.

Things are really coming to a head in the geared motor industry, as Chinese gearbox manufacturers continue to produce look-alike models and dump them on markets around the world.  In Australia, copies of nearly every SEW-Eurodrive offering are being supplied as substitutes to the real thing, not as pass-offs but as explicit alternatives.

Not content with the SEW range, Motorvario wormboxes are rich pickings for the copiers, as are Cyclodrives and even Var-Spe units.  Chinese manufacturers have reverse-engineered nearly every geared motor that is available on the market today.

Many gearbox brands are manufacturing components in China and importing them for local assembly, which manages to keep a handle on production quality.  Unfortunately, the range of fully-imported copies is poor by comparison and I sincerely hope that customers do not suffer for it too soon.

Why Fridays?

Why does every single Friday afternoon turn to mud after lunch?  After a reasonably quiet day, all hell broke loose today at around 1400, with one customer requiring an urgent taxi, another an urgent point-to-point courier and another wanted something delivered after hours tomorrow.

I'm not going to link to anything corny about Fridays, such as this, this or, heaven forbid this, but it would be really handy if customers could break things on Monday or Tuesday mornings and give suppliers a one day heads up.

In the washup, not everything managed to get out as some of ATT's suppliers had knocked off early for a traditional Friday beer.  One requires all of their diplomacy skills in relaying this information to the customer.

Risk Management in the PT World

Yesterday (July 14th, 2011), the courier company Couriers Please had a technical meltdown which resulted in the inability to receive bookings - both on the phone and the internet. 

All Torque uses Couriers Please for the majority of our daily pick ups for a number of reasons: they pick up and deliver three times per day, the pricing is reasonable and bookings are normally trouble-free.

It is only in times of crisis that one realises how much they rely on something.  We had expected seven things to be coming in for customers, as well as two things going out, when we found that the Couriers Please system had failed.  In desperation, we had to triage the most important jobs and organise point-to-point couriers to keep things coming in.  This was only achieved well into the afternoon, when the Couriers Please website eventually gave word of the problems they were experiencing.

Couriers Please are normally quite reliable, but yesterday's delays proved that relying too much on one supplier can be hazardous.  From now on, we will have to keep two courier companies on the hook for our business, cost economies of scale be damned.

School Holidays - Fantastic!

Well, school holidays are playing havoc with the All Torque roster; with Craig already part way through his break and Greg about to enjoy two weeks on a Pacific island.  Added to this is the bout of flu going around at the moment, with the occasional day off thrown in.

We run a fairly lean operation so any staff shortages require everyone else to step up.  School holidays are great for the flow of traffic in the morning but for some reason there is no equivalent reduction in workload.  Can anyone explain it?

Only the One Price Rise

All Torque has a range of suppliers, chiefly Bonfiglioli, Baldor, WEG, Flender, Warner, Comintec and PIV.  Most of these are exclusive or shared distributorships and are important to our continued growth.

Of all of these, Baldor are the only supplier to have a "New Price List" for the new financial year.  With most of the product range coming directly from the United States and the skyrocketing Australian dollar, it is a wonder that most of the Baldor offering has risen in price (there are some notable exceptions, where the price has actually reduced). 

The question now is: how many suppliers have reduced their prices based upon the stong Australian dollar? 

We have seen recently that bringing stuff in directly ex Europe or the States for one-off jobs has been quite lucrative for our customers.  Many are buying in new equipment to replace existing that only two years ago they would never have dreamed of doing.

I'm sure the business to be in at the moment is international freight forwarding.