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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowIt pays to be responsive to customers, say leaders of Indiana companies that make products on demand.
From Mach Medical, which manufactures knee replacement implants and other orthopedics, to Homefield Apparel, which prints college T-shirts featuring vintage designs, filling orders as they arrive is a way to minimize inventory costs.
Columbia City-based Mach Medical is a business-to-business company that works with equipment suppliers such as Johnson & Johnson and Stryker. Speedway-based Homefield Apparel sells directly to consumers.
For 80/20 Inc., a modular framing manufacturer founded 35 years ago in Columbia City, customers include corporations as well as the general public. “Build your idea” serves as 80/20’s motto for anyone who visits the company’s website to design aluminum workstations, robotics, safety enclosures and other projects.
“People don’t want to go shopping,” said Rodney Strack, 80/20’s executive sales manager. “They want to go to one spot, find what they need and be done.”
Striving for efficiency drives the on-demand philosophies of Mach Medical, Homefield Apparel and 80/20 Inc., even if the companies have little else in common.
Mach Medical
Founded in 2019, Mach Medical expresses a mission to “revolutionize the orthopedic supply chain.”
Steve Rozow, general manager and co-founder of Mach Medical, said inventory can be a burden for Johnson & Johnson, Indiana-based medical device giant Zimmer Biomet Holdings Inc. and other companies.
“It’s not uncommon to see [companies] have well over a year’s worth of inventory sitting on their balance sheet,” Rozow said. “The value of that measures in the billions, and the cost of carrying that measures a very meaningful portion of their cost of sales.”
Mach Medical touts a single-flow manufacturing approach that can help clients reduce inventory by 83% and cost of goods by as much as 48%.
“Our big vision is to be able to take information from the patient’s preoperative planning event, feed that into our manufacturing system, build that product for that patient in time for their surgical event and deliver it,” Rozow said.
As a contract manufacturer along the U.S. 30 medical devices corridor spanning Warsaw to Fort Wayne, Mach Medical makes orthopedics of stainless steel and alloys of titanium and cobalt chromium.
“People come in different sizes,” Rozow noted, which makes it important for Mach Medical to engineer an array of options for devices.
Rozow compared the company’s work to what’s required to stock a shoe store.
“If I want to be a competitive shoe store, then I need to make sure that in that store I have different styles of shoes for people to select from, as well as the full range of sizes that would meet the population’s requirement,” he said.
But patients who need hip replacements don’t visit a store.
“The ‘shoe store’ comes to them, and that happens at the time of surgery,” Rozow said.
The non-Mach orthopedic supply chain is based on projected demand, which is imprecise, Rozow said.
“You’re going to get a portion of that wrong, and that results in all kinds of waste,” he said.
Homefield Apparel
When Connor Hitchcock launched an online T-shirt company a decade ago during his undergraduate days at Indiana University, screen-printing with water-based inks posed a soggy challenge at his apartment that doubled as production headquarters.
“I had a back deck,” Hitchcock said. “I would take a couple of shirts out at a time to be in the sun for a few hours.”
The curing process concluded with a short session in a clothes dryer.
In 2018, Hitchcock and his wife, Christa Hitchcock, founded Homefield Apparel—now based in a 17,000-square-foot facility south of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and north of the Allison Transmission campus.
This spring, Homefield launched a line of Indianapolis 500-themed shirts. Hitchcock said his company now cranks out screen-print batches of 144 T-shirts, which is a reasonable amount for accommodating fans of the Greatest Spectacle in Racing plus schools such as IU, Purdue University, Auburn University and the University of Texas.
Meanwhile, Homefield has built a national reputation by selling shirts associated with smaller schools, including the University of Detroit Mercy, St. Peter’s University and the Colorado School of Mines.
On-demand manufacturing provided an efficient solution for this niche and is an important part of Homefield’s business model. Direct-to-garment printing uses a digital art file and ink jet technology.
“We ended up going digital because if we want to make great designs for all schools, I can’t hold 144 shirts of a Division III school,” Hitchcock said. “I just can’t. It will sit on my shelves for a long time. But they still deserve to have great shirts.”
Homefield adopted direct-to-garment printing in 2019, and the company’s facility now features 12 printers. Hitchcock estimated that Homefield was among the first 20% of streetwear brands to incorporate a digital plan for shirts.
“I don’t want to say we were on the cutting edge, but we were on the earlier side of making a bet on the technology,” he said.
With 2,000 designs offered at Homefield’s website, Hitchcock said on-demand manufacturing makes the most of blank shirts that have yet to be printed.
“Once a gray shirt is printed for Ball State, it can only be a Ball State shirt,” he said. “If I have 200 schools, and there’s a gray design for all of them, the shirt can be one of 200 schools.”
80/20 Inc.
In contrast to Mach Medical and Homefield Apparel, the business model at 80/20 Inc. calls for having a wealth of inventory on hand.
The company’s 290,000-square-foot headquarters 15 miles west of Fort Wayne is filled with T-slot aluminum bars, connectors and accessories used in the assembly of countless structures. T-slot bars feature unlimited mounting points for hardware pieces.
Strack, 80/20’s executive sales manager, said the company’s on-demand component is similar to an Erector Set—a “build your idea” metal construction toy and a 20th century sensation.
“We’re able to react quickly to somebody saying, ‘Hey, I need a table,’ or, ‘I need a new workstation,’” Strack said. “We’re able to say, ‘Great. How big? What size?’”
Late entrepreneur Don Wood founded 80/20 and named the company after the “Pareto Principle,” an 1897 observation by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto in which 80% of results are generated by 20% of efforts.
Strack said 80/20’s work isn’t complicated, but the company’s responsiveness to customers can be viewed as innovative.
Customers range from home hobbyists to aerospace companies that place seven-figure orders, Strack said.
While visitors to 80/20’s website can purchase items that are shipped out as kits, the company also offers an “80/20 Builds” service. For 80/20 Builds, in-house technicians consult submitted designs and assemble finished products that are sent to customers.
“Besides just having [T-slot bars] for customers, we also fill gaps where the skill set required to make a workstation maybe isn’t there,” Strack said. “Maybe they don’t have a certified welder on staff. That’s OK with our system. You don’t need that skilled individual. You can do it with a general laborer of sorts.”•
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