In every industry today, organizations succeed by focusing on what they do best and leaving the rest to their partners, agencies or outsourced vendors. Contract manufacturing, while it can be difficult from a supply chain perspective, seems to fit neatly into this scenario. In addition to allowing global organizations to focus more on their core competencies, value proposition, and engineering; contract manufacturers provide several other advantages over manufacturing products internally to include: lower costs, flexibility, access to external expertise and reduced capital expenditures.
However, the question remains and must be addressed: with so much potential and cost savings that contract manufacturing can offer to their partners, why do so many of these relationships fall short of expectations? Perhaps one reason is that many of those expectations are flawed from the very beginning.
For example, lets take the first example of cost savings. The fact of the matter is that many of the cost savings that should be passed on to the customers may go to the contract manufacturers bottom line instead. This happens more than you think. Additionally, many contract...