You order the same twelve parts every quarter. Stop re-quoting them.
Equipment builders order on a rhythm: spares for the installed base, fixtures for the line, brackets and plates for the current build, and the same handful of part numbers again next quarter. The engineering on a repeat part should happen exactly once.
Here it does. The Job Packet is the asset, and a reorder of an existing packet prices instantly at any prior quantity — because nothing about it needs to be figured out again.
- Quantities
- 1 – 500 instant · 501 – 5,000 engineered quote in 2 business days · above 5,000, a program conversation
- Reorders
- Always instant, at any prior quantity. The packet already exists, so the engineering is not re-done and not re-billed
- Stock ladder
- Plate and bar in defined increments across a 0.25″ – 4.5″ thickness ladder — the shared ladder is what makes cross-customer batching possible
- Materials
- 6061-T6 · 7075-T651 · 303 · 304 · 17-4PH · 1018 · 4140 · brass 360 · Ti 6Al-4V (flagged) · Delrin 150 · UHMW · PEEK (flagged) · polycarbonate
Machine-build hardware, sorted by lane.
Read the rule at the left of each row. A solid object line prices instantly. A dash-dot phantom line is inside the envelope but pauses for an engineer, inside four business hours. A dashed hidden line is real work on the Sourcing lane — human-quoted inside two business days, with a committed date.
Most equipment bills of material split cleanly: the plates, brackets, covers, and manifolds sit in the Catalog, and the shafts, weldments, and ground components sit in Sourcing. One company handles both, and one company is accountable for both.
- Guard, panel, and cover mounting platesCatalogPrismatic plate work inside 12″ × 8″ × 4″
- Gearbox and drive coversCatalog3-axis with an op1 / op2 flip; pilot bores at Precision class
- Sensor, switch, and proximity bracketsCatalogSmall prismatic parts, above the 0.375″ × 0.375″ × 0.125″ floor
- Cam plates, linkage plates, and lever armsCatalog4140 annealed or precipitation-hardened, both on the ladder
- Wear plates and slides in UHMW or Delrin 150CatalogIn the library. Min wall on plastics is 0.060″, and the plate has to fit inside 12″ × 8″ × 4″ — a long slide rail does not
- Conveyor hardware: guide brackets, pillow-block adapter platesCatalogHigh-repeat geometry — the packet gets written once and reused for years
- Hydraulic and pneumatic manifold blocksCatalogCross-drilling inside 8:1 depth-to-diameter; taps from the standard library
- Assembly jigs, gauge plates, and fixtures for your own lineCatalogPrismatic, in library materials, and usually needed yesterday. Certs and a dimensional report ship with them, because a gauge is inspection equipment
- Machined spares for the installed base, from a released modelCatalogReorders of an existing packet are always instant, at any prior quantity
- Customer-supplied material, including your own certified stockCatalog · flaggedAccepted with cert. It flags, and it voids the batching discount
- Undercuts, T-slots, and dovetailsCatalog · flaggedSpecial tooling path — engineer disposition inside 4 business hours
- Quantities from 501 to 5,000 piecesSourcingEngineered quote in 2 business days. Above 5,000 it becomes a program conversation
- Shafts, bushings, collars, and turned spacersSourcingNo turning in the v1 envelope. It is first in line for the next container size
- Weldments, frames, and fabricated basesSourcingNo welding in v1 — brokered through vetted shops with a committed date
- Ground or hardened-and-ground surfacesSourcingNo grinding in v1
- Tool-steel die, punch, and mold componentsSourcingTool steels are not on the fixed stock ladder
- Plates and weldment machining larger than 12″ × 8″SourcingOutside the box that fits every network machine with fixture clearance
Why staying on the ladder is worth money to you.
Parts from different customers that share a material, a stock-ladder step, a workholding family, a tolerance class, and a compatible date run together in one setup. No single shop sees enough order flow to do that. A network does — it is the machining equivalent of nesting many customers' parts on one sheet.
The savings are structural, not clever: one setup amortized across members, one material buy under one lot cert, one fixture load, and consolidated tool changes.
The split is published and fixed
About a third of the saving goes to your price, about a third to the shop that runs the batch, about a third to us. Exact ratios get tuned from delivered data; the three-way principle does not move. The shop has to want batches or honest calendars die, and honest calendars are the whole model.
The date always outranks the batch
Orders do not wait for batches; batches form around orders. When your routing deadline arrives, the job runs — batched or not. A guaranteed date that could be quietly traded for a better margin would not be a guarantee.
What blocks a batch, stated plainly
ITAR segregation, customer-supplied material, cosmetic-critical finishes that cannot share a fixture with heavy roughing, and any exclusivity you have bought. Each of those is a real reason your price will not carry the batch discount, and each is named on the quote rather than absorbed silently.
A program is a schedule, not a discount.
The interesting thing about an installed base is that it makes demand predictable. Predictable demand can be scheduled ahead of the order, which is worth more to both of us than any amount of haggling over a one-off.
- 01
First order
Upload the model. Automated DFM checks it against the envelope, names the lane, and returns a price and date options — or names the violating feature in plain language and routes you to a human.
- 02
Reorder
One click. The packet exists, the fixture family exists, the inspection plan exists, and the shop that ran it last has the tooling. Any prior quantity, priced instantly.
- 03
Program
Scheduled recurring runs with capacity reserved ahead of the order, so your spares do not compete with the rest of the board for a slot in the week you need them.
- 04
More part numbers
The expensive part of adding a part number is the engineering, and that only happens once per part. The second one is cheaper than the first for structural reasons, not promotional ones.
Reserved capacity is somebody's calendar.
A program only works if the shops behind it declare availability honestly. So capacity declaration is the simplest screen in the shop portal, and declared-versus-actual availability is measured alongside on-time rate and first-pass yield.
A shop's standing is an output of what it delivered, not a membership tier it bought. Standing drives routing priority and financing eligibility, and it is published to the shop in full.
The Data Covenant
- 01A shop’s data wins it work and underwrites it (routing priority, financing eligibility).
- 02It is never used to negotiate that shop’s rates down.
- 03Each shop sees its own standing in full, including exactly how routing priority is computed.
- 04Public and aggregate uses (the Index, capability claims) are anonymized; no shop-identifiable data leaves the network without written consent.
All four clauses, as they appear in the shop agreement. Clause two is why calendars stay honest, and honest calendars are why we can commit a date to you before we know which shop will run the job. A network that used delivery data as leverage in a rate negotiation would get exactly the calendars it deserved, and every guaranteed date downstream of those calendars would be fiction.
Clause four is the one that matters most on this page. Cross-customer batching only works if shops will put their parts next to strangers' parts, and they will only do that if nothing shop-identifiable leaves the network without written consent.
Falling standing starts a conversation, not a de-listing. Removal is reserved for integrity failures — falsified inspection data is immediate and permanent, in both directions of this relationship.
Run a shop with real open capacity and a calendar you can defend?
Apply as a ShopHalf your bill of materials, honestly.
No turning, no welding, no grinding, and nothing larger than 12″ × 8″ × 4″ in the Catalog lane. That is a real limitation on a machine build, and pretending otherwise would cost you a schedule.
What it does not mean is that you need a second vendor. Sourcing takes the shafts, the weldments, the ground surfaces, and the oversize plates — human-quoted inside two business days, brokered through vetted shops, with the same documentation and the same single accountable party. The difference is the instrument behind the date: a Catalog date carries automatic credits, a Sourcing date is committed without them, because we guarantee with money only where we hold the delivery data.
And every Sourcing job is logged with the feature class that put it there. When a class exceeds five percent of inbound demand for two consecutive quarters and the verification method for it exists, it graduates into the Catalog. Turning is first in line. Your uploads are the vote.