To all on the list.
As most of us know, on Tuesday at the RP&M Conference, Terry Wholers gave a
presentation about the state of the RP industry. In that presentation he
said one thing that
I just can not understand.
I quote "THERE ARE TO MANY SERVICE BUREAUS" and "WE NEED TO LIMIT THE NUMBER
OF SERVICE BUREAUS".
How is this possible and why? I think of all RP machines as tools much like
EDM Machines, Plastic Injection Presses or CNC Machines. It would be totally
unwise to say that there are to many machine shops or to many molders
throughout the world. To me his statement sounded more like something a
service company or machine builder would say about competition. Not
something a so called unbiased industry expert would say.
In this case I think more is better. The more SB's there are the more the
technology will be accepted as a useful tool. By limiting the number of
SB's, smaller companies would not be able to afford RP nor would they feel
comfortable enough to even try it. I think we keep trying to sell RP to the
same group of people or size of company. We need to find a new audience.
He also said that SB's will have to struggle to make a profit. My experience
has been that, most SB's charged way to much for the quality of parts they
make anyway, and their prices should come down. We don't consider ourselves
a traditional service company but we do make parts for other companies, and
almost daily we meet and talk to people who not only think they cant afford
RP but many people don't even know it exist. These same people come up with
new ideas and uses that most of us never even though possible or even would
try. These are the kinds of people that will make the market much larger
than most of us try to put numbers to. Think of all of the technology we use
today that some experts thought would not last or would last in some limited
capacity but has proven to be far more useful than expected. I don't know
where these guys get there numbers but I am now starting to wonder if any
one can claim to be an expert with regard to the RP industry. The market is
what we make it .
Who have you told about what you do for a living? Try telling one new person
a day what you do for a living and see what kind of response you get.
Please don't take this as a personal attack. I just wanted to see if I was
the only one who felt this way.
Vern Carter
CTS.
For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 22:45:43 EEST