In all countries, some make garbage, but most of all do not. The ones do garbage one time or are always delayed on delivery times, loose the customer forever and sooner or later they will be out of business.

It’s important to know the tooling shops you ask quote for each project or at least if you do not know it, know the type of tooling in which they are specialized. Mold makers cannot get a high-precision mold for an electrical connector with more than 800 small thin and long inserts on any tool shop.

Each case is a single one. A guy just looking at numbers in a spreadsheet knows about numbers and figures, only the engineering department can guide him to decide and unfortunately more often and often the tooling engineer opinion is not consider or as a small weight on final decision.

After decades of working in the mold making industry where it was the responsibility of the tool engineering department to make the final call on who, why and where based upon our technical knowledge of the suppliers, their capabilities, equipment and loading, I landed in a couple of companies that the final and undisputed decision was a buyer in the purchasing department. This just absolutely floored me, the guy making the decision on who and where my injection mold would be built was a guy with and Excel sheet with prices and delivery times, and no concept if the guy could even build the mold.

I looked at another new hire at the company, and he just laughed and said welcome to the frigging circus.

Then I found out that the buyer completely ignored my specifications and gave liberty to the mold maker, “Oh, we don’t need that”. Forget it, to items that were in our customer specifications. So he was the hero for saving thousands of Euros, until the customer saw the designs.