Don’t tell John Gormley about your cool ideas on how to purchase automation components. Unless your buying idea is powerfully compelling, he wants you to work within his company’s standardized procurement procedures. Get too innovative and you’ll gum things up.
“We have a purchasing group attached to each division with a central purchasing function,” explains Gormley, department manager of manufacturing systems at Dallas-based Texas Instruments Inc. “We try to standardize on high volume PLCs, sensors and mechanical components as well. Individual buyers have good ideas, but unless the idea is very compelling, we stay with our standards.”
In choosing suppliers, TI looks for business stability and longevity. “Control systems have a long lifecycle,” notes Gormley. “Our systems have a longer lifecycle than the components, so we choose people who are going to be around.” That often means looking for well-established suppliers who are likely to stay in business for a few decades.
The quality of the component is also important to Gormley. “We want to stay with big players because they make quality products and they’ll be around.” The cheap alternative can be expensive if the manufacturer finds that a good deal on a cheap component means greater risk of part failure. “We try to avoid the small guys,” says Gormley. “It comes down to evaluating the total cost of ownership.”
TI is interested in developing long-term relationships with component suppliers partly because many of its own products have a very long lifecycles. “In some cases, our products have short lifecycles, but we’re still making some products that were designed in the 1940s,” says Gormley. So as TI introduces new technology into its older automation systems, the new technology needs to work within the legacy system. “It helps if you have a drive that is backward compatible so you can load the program without having to redesign,” says Gormley.
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