The basic premise that precipitated the start of the company was service. We did not find any of the screwdriving companies provided what we felt to be even a reasonable level of service or commitment to customer needs. This lack of service spanned from providing properly operating systems all the way to simple courtesy on the telephone.
We wanted to treat people better and have a sense of urgency for their needs. One basic principal of this approach was spare parts availability. From day one we committed to the statement that anything we sell will have 100% spare coverage on the shelf 100% of the time. This includes all custom and fastener specific tooling; along with purchased parts. If we shipped it out of this building, we have spares in stock.
Once we started the process of designing our systems, we naturally went down the same path everyone else does. Automated screwdriving and feeding systems are all very similar in their general design. The variability between the manufactures is simply varying levels of quality. Once we started looking at addressing some of the common issues we regularly see with integrating these systems we took a step back and asked the question;
How would we do this if an automated screw driver didn’t already exist? Turned out the answer was, we would not do it the way it is most commonly done.
This question birthed 2 years of design and development and a handful of features and methods unique and valuable enough to justify perusing patent protection. The only 2 factors considered in the design were performance and quality. Cost was not given any consideration as it was our belief that if the performance and reliability met our requirements any reasonable cost could be justified. It was literally after the design was finalized and long-term trials were run that we made a batch of 10 units to determine the cost. It turned out that our expertise in manufacturing had a significant yet almost sub-conscious impact on the cost to produce. This along with our intent to maintain stock of all parts; by default had us mass producing everything rather than a “build to order” system. These two factors resulted in our products arriving at a very competitive price point and actually at a cost advantage relative to other systems considered to be of high quality.