Aerospace and defense — Build-to-print machining and fabrication
Quoted from standards that drift, on parts whose revisions change without the price being revisited.
Build-to-print is a business run on other people's drawings. You do not own the design, so you cannot engineer your way out of a bad price. The only variables you control are the process, the material and the paperwork — and all three were priced once, at quote, often years before the last shipment against that order.
long-term agreement
release schedule
lot size
first article
special process approval
material certification
tooling amortization
quoted vs actual cycle time
These are the terms the review uses with you. A page written for
an aerospace and defense manufacturer generally would not contain any of them.
Where it concentrates here
Specific to build-to-print machining and fabrication, not to an aerospace and defense manufacturer generally. Each is
concentrated — a single agreement, a single code, a single account nobody reviews
— which is why a sample of the operation tends to miss it and a full pass tends to
find it. They are not findings from a named engagement.
Long-term agreements with fixed prices and no material escalator, signed when the alloy cost something else, still releasing against a schedule the customer sets.
Drawing revisions arriving under the same part number at the same price, adding an operation, a tolerance or an inspection that nobody re-quoted.
Special processes — heat treat, plating, NDT, finishing — subcontracted to accredited suppliers whose increases pass through to you rather than through you.
Set-up absorbed on releases far smaller than the lot size the part was quoted at, so a part loses money every time it runs and the annual total never shows it.
Tooling and fixtures amortized over a quantity that was forecast rather than ordered, with the unrecovered balance sitting in inventory as though it were an asset.
Where this data actually lives
JobBOSS, E2, ProShop or Global Shop as the ERP, with shop-floor data collection only as good as the labor tickets actually clocked against it
Estimating in a spreadsheet the ERP does not know about, holding the cycle times the quote was built from
Net-Inspect or Discus for first article (AS9102) submissions, with material certifications in a separate folder
Customer portals — Exostar, SAP Ariba, a prime's own supplier site — where the delivery schedule changes before the ERP hears about it
Named because it changes what the intake asks
for. An extract from one of these has known gaps, and the review is built around them
rather than surprised by them.
The proposal is written for an aerospace and defense manufacturer as a
whole — the sequence, what we would need from you, and what it costs for your
number of operating units. What is on this page is what we would additionally expect to
find in build-to-print machining and fabrication.