Production Engineering has had a couple of advances in
the last twenty years both pioneered in Japan.
FMS, flexible manufactoring systems are small
production cells designed to be switchable between a
range of products for small production runs. One
company that uses this in the UK is a HiFi company
called Linn Products. FMS enables a company to switch
quickly to what is in demand at short notice.
The other advance is JIT, just in time. This is a
policy of not holding large amount of stock, where
suppliers are flexible and have short supply lead
times on supplying fresh components. This approach can
then propergate all the way through the supply chain.
High value items such as the LX, Limited and FA* lens
would be highly suitable to these production
techniques.
--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I'd have to say Mike is right on in his New Old
> Stock comments.
>
> I worked for 10 years for a children's book/game/toy
> manufacturer.
> The $15-$25 books were always hell to forecast.
> The Sales department was always optimistic,
> hoping for low costs from a big production run.
> Doing forecasting and inventory control,
> we ended up with 10 years inventory of some books.
>
> The point is, when you make 10,000 or 20,000 of
> something,
> the setup costs on production runs eat you alive.
>
> Regards, Bob S.
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>
> << Pal wrote:
>
> > REPLY:
> > If anyone could put up a low volume production
> line, its Pentax. Look at
> the
> > lens line: Most of the 35mm system lenses are low
> volume items. In
> addition,
> > you have the medium format lenses, also low
> volume. Pentax possibly make
> > around 100 different lenses. The vast majority
> are low volume items.
> Pentax do
> > indeed have the production means to make such
> items. I sort of doubt that
> eg.
> > Canon has.
>
>
> This is not how lenses are manufactured. If a
> company sells 200 lenses a
> year it doesn't mean that they produce 200 lenses
> that year on any
> "low-volume production line." Many lenses are made
> in batches by devoting
> production facilities to a "run" of them and then
> sold out of N.O.S., or new
> old stock. The company evaluates sales, makes a
> projection (educated guess
> about future sales), crunches the numbers, decides
> on a batch size, and
> evaluates whether a run will be profitable.
> Lower-selling items have sales
> projections that in some cases stretch to a decade
> and more. Many products
> are made in one run only.
>
> With all camera companies, many of the items you
> buy as "new" were not
> manufactured recently. In some cases, I've known of
> specific products that
> have sold out of N.O.S. for more than 20 years.
>
> This explains a few things the consumer market
> sometimes sees. For example,
> when Nikon introduced its AF lenses, there were
> chronic intermittent
> shortages of certain items for several
> years--that's because Nikon badly
> underestimated demand and was caught short of
> product with no production
> facilities scheduled to be assigned to those
> products again until an
> already-decided future date. It also explains steep
> price hikes in lenses,
> as when the Zeiss 35mm shift lens went from $600+
> to about $2200 in the
> space of a year in the early '90s. What happened
> was that Kyocera had been
> selling N.O.S. made in the '70s, ran out of them,
> and ordered a new batch
> from Zeiss. Zeiss charged Kyocera based on
> then-present production costs,
> which meant that Kyocera had to sell the new-run
> lenses for much more than
> it had been charging for the previous stock.
>
> This also explains why decisions have to be made
> about whether to
> discontinue a product. It's not a question of
> stopping a production line
> that's been running continuously for years: it's a
> decision about whether
> they think it will be profitable to make another
> run. For example, Nikon
> Special Optics used to make two enlarging lenses
> called the Apo-El-Nikkors.
> The less expensive one sold for $2,300. These sold
> out of N.O.S. for many
> years. When Nikon Special Optics finally ran low
> and investigated the
> feasibility of another run in the mid -'90s, it was
> determined that the new
> production would have to be retailed for $25,000
> per lens! So of course the
> product was "discontinued." In fact, it hadn't been
> made in decades.
>
> Tooling sometimes forces these decisons to me be
> made. For instance, when
> Mamiya discontinued the C330 TLR, it was because
> the old tooling had worn
> out and would not stand another run. So the company
> had to make the decision
> whether to re-tool. But that's expensive, and sales
> had been steadily
> declining. For a while they said yes, they would,
> then no, then yes, and
> finally they decided that future sales and profits
> would simply not repay
> the investment, so the product (regretfully for
> Mamiya, since it was a
> signature product) was allowed to be
> "discontinued." However, when Beseler
> was forced to make the same decision with the 23C
> enlarger, it waffled in a
> similar fashion for a bit, but it made the opposite
> decision, and that's why
> we got the 23CIII.
>
> Many times, when you buy new Pentax lenses or any
> other camera product, you
> are not necessarily buying a product that has been
> newly manufactured. Nor
> can you make meaningful assumptions about the sizes
> of production lines or
> batch volumes based on annual sales figures.
>
> --Mike >>
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=====
Regards
Richard Saunders
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