by Mark Pecha, Plant Manager
It is a given that you will get a quality product, on time, from Gallagher Corporation. Let me address another important concern for customers - knowing that the Gallagher Corporation price will be competitive, on a world wide basis. Being world wide competitive is a key part of our strategy and is based on controlling our costs. We control costs through all of the following:
Our Raw Material Inventory is carefully controlled at about 20 turns per year. All materials are prime and only from approved suppliers. Approximately 90% of all raw material purchases are per negotiated contracts, giving us the most favorable price.
Our continued investment in the latest processing, molding and machining equipment (in 2006 we added $1,162,000.00 of new machinery) keeps our manufacturing cost on medium to high production as low as anyone in the US and comparable to many off-shore molders.
While our salary and benefit costs go up every year, our steady increase in productivity from our well paid, well trained, safe, and stable work force has been able to hold or reduce our labor cost per unit.
We engineer tooling, fixtures, and set-ups so that they are designed and built to balance the customer expectations on cost and durability.
The cost of poor quality -- nonconforming parts, rework and inspections -- are historically very low at Gallagher Corporation but receive our continual attention.
There are many reasons why our sales increased 20% in 2006, with exports reaching 10% of sales, but certainly one big factor is that we are constantly reviewing all costs.
