.jpg?lang=en-US)
Charter Steel’s innovative approach helped save money, improve delivery time and ultimately develop a better product for their customer.
Challenge:
A cold heading customer approached Charter Steel to shorten their supply chain—on-shoring from the AsiaPacific region, reduce costs for their unique recessed head fasteners and secure Charter as a sole material supplier.
Result:
After failures with our most formable material at the time, we collaborated with our rolling mill, processing plant and lab, utilizing innovation to develop a solution to maximize the material’s formability. In just over three months of development, we created a unique process for our customer that reduced costs by almost half and cut supply times from four months to two weeks.
Solution:
We created a design experiment and ran coils with various iterations to determine what would impact the formability. From that test, we identified six different coils that worked with unique cooling codes and processing combinations.
Charter is uniquely suited to run trials like this due to small batch capability, on-site processing, on-site lab and the ability to rapidly test and easily track and sample throughout the process.
When analyzed in the lab, one specific process showed the most promise. The trials we ran with the customer were successful and resulted in a significant impact for our customer, saving them over 43% in costs.
Charter Steel’s technical team, coupled with on-site processing capabilities, allowed us to go above and beyond to create a unique solution to meet our customer’s needs.
Download the full case study.