What is Speedigus®?

A colleague asked me last week “What is Speedigus?®”

Granted she is fairly new to the world of igus®, so she can be forgiven, but it dawned on me that if she doesn’t know, how many of our customers don’t know? Here is a bit of background of how and why we introduced Speedigus® to the world.

What is Speedigus?

Speedigus® was invented when we realised that there was sometimes a disjointed relationship between the speed of manufacturing custom parts and a need for speed  for delivering and we decided this needed addressing. What we didn’t want as a company was to rush the manufacturing process and for it to become detrimental to the parts we were producing which could have quite possibly happened. So we looked at the bigger picture, what was more important to customers? Cost or speed? It became apparent that sometimes speed meant that in the long run, cost was reduced!

Industries using Speedigus

We noticed that industries like Motorsport and Aerospace couldn’t afford downtime and in this situation, time is money.  Speedigus® was modelled on this very theory. We started offering a “Speedigus®” (pronounced speedeegus) service, which literally translated into paying a premium for a quicker turnaround. Obviously, this was offered on a case by case basis as some parts simply were too complexed for this service.

The standard lead time for custom machined parts from stock material is approx. 10-15 working days, depending on the part, so we started to offer a service which reduced the number of delivery days but there was a cost implication. This meant that depending on how quickly the customer needed the parts,  reflected the surcharge. The turnaround could be as little as 24 hours, but when a production line can cost in excess of £5000 a day when it’s not running, the pennies really do look after the pounds.

We didn’t limit this to the machined side, we released it to the soft tooling service that we offer. The same principle was applied here, but this was slightly more complicated due to the tooling process so, although the guidelines are the same, it is not always possible to offer such a quick turnaround. 

If you compare the options at the time of a breakdown situation, it ceases to be an option, it becomes a given. When you consider that a hard steel tool could cost anywhere in the region of £3000-£5000 and can take 8 weeks to produce samples, 10 days and a considerably lower cost for a soft aluminium tool and samples becomes a no-brainer.

Customers use this service to preserve their production schedule. They have the flexibility of prioritising what is important to them, time or money and in such a fast-flowing world, sometimes it doesn’t boil down to penny-pinching. Sometimes we have to look at the bigger picture.

Speedigus to Speedifit

We expanded on this idea for speed and began offering a “speedifit®” service which, in essence, follows similar principles as Speedigus®. Rather than sending parts in component form and leaving the assembly up to the customer, we can manufacture and assemble the parts or systems. This eliminates time when the goods arrive, taking the stress off you as a customer and ensuring you have a fully assembled component delivered, ready for installation.

In a world where time is at the heart of it, it doesn’t stop, it’s of the essence and no-one has any, why wouldn’t you highlight to people that time is money, money is time and they can be equally as important or completely disproportionate. It is all about your priorities and everyone’s are different. What are yours?

For more blogs to do with iglidur® bar stock visit https://blog.igus.co.uk/category/dry-tech/plastic-rod/