How Mill Liner Lead Times Impact Your Costs
Does this sound familiar? Your mill liner supplier quotes you a lead time that’s a lot longer than you expected – and when you place the order, they take even longer than they promised to deliver it. This situation can be costing your company in more ways than you’re aware.
Multiple areas of your operation can experience increased costs due to extended or delayed lead times. You might even be foregoing opportunities to improve the grinding performance of your mills. The net effect is the erosion of your bottom line. Let’s take a look at how lead times can impact your operating costs.
When your mill liner suppliers lead times are long and/or unreliable, your operations can be negatively impacted in a number of ways.
Increased Carrying Costs
If you add inventory to hedge against long or delayed deliveries, your administrative costs will increase as a result of having to manage excess inventory. It unnecessarily ties up cash that could be used for other expenses. And it adds short term assets to your financial balance sheet, reducing operational efficiency.
Lost Productivity
If your supplier lead times are long and/or inconsistent, this requires more administrative time and effort to track delayed deliveries and reschedule planned changeouts.
If you don’t have replacement liners when you need them, your operations will operate less efficiently until worn liners can be replaced, impacting throughput. Worst case, you might have to stop a mill altogether until replacement liners are available.
And if you stock multiple liner sets, you have to cycle through them before you can take advantage of improved designs that could increase the grinding efficiency of your mills.
Higher Prices
To offset fluctuations of raw materials from the time an order is placed to the time it’s delivered, some suppliers add surcharges to the final invoice. The final price may be more than you were originally quoted, making your costs unpredictable.
Conclusion
You shouldn’t have to put up with additional cost and productivity burdens because your supplier can’t deliver your orders when you need them or when they say they will. Fast, consistent delivery times allow you to reduce or eliminate the carrying costs of stocking backup sets of liners. And you can get better, faster by taking advantage of improved liner designs on your next changeout, instead of having to cycle though one or more sets of liners with a less efficient design. At FC Mill Liners, Inc., our manufacturing processes are designed to deliver quality products quickly, consistently, on time, every time.
Contact us now to learn how you can benefit from our fast, consistent delivery times.
