Tag Archives: Business

Dr. Fastener: Aerospace Fasteners

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Reprint from China Fastener World Magazine, Vol. 186

Q: What are Aerospace Fasteners?
A: Aerospace Fasteners are fasteners that are used in aircraft and space vehicles. Normally the Aerospace Fastener market breaks into three segments; Commercial Aircraft, Business Jets, and Defense and Space. Many Aerospace Fasteners fall into similar categories as industrial and automotive fasteners, like bolts and screws, wrenchable nuts, and inserts but there are some fasteners that fall into categories only found in aerospace like pin and collars, anchor plates, and panel fasteners. Somewhere around 40% – 50% of all Aerospace Fasteners are made to National Aerospace Standards Committee (NASC) standards.

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A Few Key Concepts When Doing Business with German Companies

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Reprint from Fastener World Magazine, Vol. 162

One needs only to type “cross cultural mistakes” into a search engine to be inundated with example after example of grievous marketing blunders made because of poor language translation or cultural misunderstanding. Consider these recent examples; an Italian ad that translated Schweppes Tonic Water into “Schweppes Toilet Water”, a Chinese ad that translated the Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan, “finger-licken’ good”, into “Eat your fingers off”, or the Coors Brewing Company slogan, “Turn it loose”, understood in a Spanish ad campaign as “Suffer from Diarrhea.”

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The Importance of Consensus Standards – Protecting all Participants in the Fastener Supply Chain

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Reprint from Fastener World Magazine, Vol. 148

Imagine a world without standards or one characterized by many competing standards. It probably does not take too long for a picture to emerge in your mind. Think back, for example, to cell phones ten years ago. If your cell phone communicated using a standard that was not available within the local network, you did not get service. This frustrated many an international traveler who expected their phone to work in the country they were visiting only to find that their phone communicated with a different standard than the local one and therefore did not work. Or for those old enough to recall, take for example, the battle between VHS and Betamax video formats. Although today both video replication formats are pretty much retired, how frustrating it was then for the owner of a player of one format to be unable to play a cassette in the other format. These are not isolated examples. Every day we touch and depend on a wide variety of items and technologies to perform in uniform and predictable ways. When things and people fail to perform in the ways we have come to expect, a great deal of frustration, inconvenience, and chaos normally ensues.

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Passing the Torch: Preparing Your Business for the Next Generation

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From Fasteners Technology International, December 2014

Jim Rohn, the famous American entrepreneur, once said, “All good men and women must take responsibility to create legacies that will take the next generation to a level we could only imagine.”

Perhaps more than at any other time in recent history, this quote sets the stage for a topic that is exceptionally important to the survival of our industry. Who is going to take the reins and usher our companies into the future?

It is clear that the fastener industry has been portrayed alongside other manufacturing industries as unglamorous, dirty and not a career of choice for any of our children. In fact, a recent poll of teenagers found that almost 75% were either ambivalent or expressed little or no interest in manufacturing careers.

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Why a Formal Quality Management System Makes Good Business Sense

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From Link Magazine, Fall 2014

On a cold night in April 1912 one of the world’s most enigmatic disasters unfolded, the sinking of what The White Star Line dubbed as the “unsinkable” ship, the RMS Titanic. Like many such events, discrepancies in eyewitness accounts, the passage of time, and the lack of hard evidence, has led to multiple theories and ideas over the years about what really happened. Suffice it to say though, the most likely explanation is that no one thing was responsible but rather many “small” things came together in the “perfect storm”. This cavalcade of events conspired against the passengers and crew on that fateful night to sink the “unsinkable” ship and seal its place in history as one of the all-time worst maritime accidents.

Although a hundred years later, we’re still searching for answers and one of the recent and more plausible theories that has been proposed has to do with, of all things…

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The Power of Value Engineering – Converting Screw Machine Parts to Cold Headed Parts

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From Link Magazine, Spring 2014

As markets become more global, customers are ever demanding new ways for suppliers to deliver them value. Over the last ten years or more, these same companies have been reducing their engineering and purchasing staffs, creating a new dependence and responsibility in their vendors to generate both quality and cost improvement ideas. For many distributors, this new responsibility is an unwelcome diversion in their already hectic and changing environment. However, for a select few, these new expectations present a unique opportunity to be exploited and profited from.

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Why Fastener Distributors Should Embrace Training

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From Link Magazine, Winter 2013

During a visit home in my junior year of college, I was told a story about something that happened to two brothers I had known from scouting. They were a couple of years younger than me and still in high school at the time. Their father had purchased a car for them with expectations that they were to be responsible for its care and upkeep. In their zeal to prove to their father that he had made a wise investment in their development, they decided to change the oil themselves. So they went out, purchased several quarts of oil, a filter, and proceeded to drain and replace the oil.

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Exceptional Customer Service is Good for Business

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From Fasteners Technology International, October 2013

About a month ago, I was driving to Detroit, MI, USA, for a couple of days of meetings. I was a little early for my first meeting, so I decided that I would stop at a restaurant and kill an hour checking emails over an iced tea. I started searching the roadside signs and spotted one for Culvers, a mid-western USA burger and frozen custard franchise, a couple of miles ahead. My wife and children are especially fond of our local Culvers restaurants, so this seemed like an excellent place to stop. When I went in, I asked to purchase an iced tea. To my surprise, the young person standing behind the counter handed me a cup and told me that the iced tea was on the house. I was shocked and even protested that I was happy to pay, but she was steadfast. I took my cup, got my iced tea and reveled in my good fortune.

Now this is a good illustration of an empowered employee making a prudent gamble in customer service. This however, is not the end of the story, nor is it really the one I’ve set out to tell. I was so impressed with this gesture though, that on my return trip home, I decided that I would make it a point to return the favor and patronize them for lunch. What happened next still has me impressed and retelling the story. When I walked in, there was a young man in his late teens or early twenties manning the only occupied register with a line of maybe six to eight hungry people waiting to order.

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Doing it Right the First Time

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Designing the right joint or fastening system up-front with some value and application engineering techniques in the early design stages is extremely important.

From Fastener Technology International, August 2012

In the 1998 movie, “Armageddon”, as he is being strapped into a space capsule atop a rocket, Rock Hound, the character played by Steve Buscemi utters this line to Harry, the character played by Bruce Willis, “Hey Harry? You know we’re sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has two hundred and seventy thousand moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn’t it?”

 In my opinion, this ranks as one of the most humorous lines from Hollywood in recent years. But unfortunately, one that expresses, at its core, an attitude that all too often seems to prevail among even the best and most enlightened users of fasteners.

 How often have you heard that, “it’s only a screw, nut or bolt” or found yourself in a tense situation trying to make or locate a fastener because your customer failed to appreciate the engineering complexity, time or dollar constraints associated with making or procuring the right one?

 Naturally, most of the readers of Fastener Technology International probably have a healthy respect for how much engineering goes into specifying, designing and manufacturing the right fastener for a specific application. You realize how critical a fastener can be to the overall success or failure of a customer’s project.

You can probably cite multiple instances of customers that have failed to adequately consider the design of the fastened joint or waited to the last minute to choose the proper fastener, and then had the audacity to wonder why your company cannot support them. How often have these delays or oversights ultimately cost the customer precious resources and you “reputation points”?

 Fortunately, no one needs to find themselves in this predicament. With proper education, communication and the latest in application and value-engineering tools, many of these pitfalls can be avoided. Generally, it doesn’t take a significant investment of time or resources to work with a manufacturer, authorized distributor or knowledgeable party to conduct value and application engineering services early in the design cycle and eliminate much of this frustration on the backend. In most cases, it is clearly evident this early investment can pay significant dividends later in the design cycle.

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