East West Manufacturing Blog

[Editor's note: This blog post originally ran in January 2017.]

You’re a company with an air- or water-moving product looking for a contract manufacturer (CM) to help take your design from prototype to market. There are plenty of companies out there willing to help you. But how do you sort through them? What differentiators should you look for?

Let’s say you’re a sourcing manager for a manufacturer. The company’s part/product is in production and things are going well. In fact, they’re going great! Things are going so great that you’re starting to get a little concerned. What happens if one of your machines goes down, you run out of a key material or some disaster — natural or man-made —...

Last year I upgraded my phone. It’s a beautiful phone – sleek, champagne colored. I love the feel of it. Unfortunately, I rarely see what the phone actually looks like because after purchase I immediately encased it in a hard plastic, optic yellow case with a turquoise blue rubber overlay.

I did that because I know me. I will drop the phone and...

I was at a recent conference where we broke into groups to discuss how technology was disrupting our industries, or was likely to do so in the future. There were six people in my group, all from different industries — health care, logistics, education, real estate, web design and manufacturing. It was fascinating to hear real life stories of the...

Design is a big deal. It’s so big it’s a category with subcategories under it. There’s design for

 So, your contract manufacturer offers Value Engineering. That’s nice.

Just one question: What does that mean?

At last! It’s time to turn your design into a physical object. While it’s exciting to see something from your imagination turn into reality, there are questions that must be answered before you can begin.

If you've ever had questions about the do's and don'ts of injection molding, this is the post for you. It's such valuable information, in fact, we asked the author, our colleague Jeff Tadin, Senior Product Development Engineer at East West, to walk us through it on video. 

In the beginning, there was an idea. But what comes next? How do you turn your vision into a reality? Or should you? Is it time to talk with an product development firm and, if so, where do you start?

All contract manufacturers (CM) are not created equal. Some focus almost exclusively on production and the manufacturing support that goes with it. Others provide a holistic approach, offering everything from design services to engineering to shipping and logistics.

This begs the question: When you’re looking for a contract manufacturing, what’s...