Business. Pivoting. In Uxbridge, Ontario.
Featuring companies from the Uxbridge Chamber of Commerce.
https://uxcc.ca/
First up, Castool Tooling Systems.
https://castool.com/

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Castool has been having a fabulous and horrible year like the rest of the world. Then, of course, early last year we saw signs in Asia of Covid-19. By the third week of March, it was here.

Castool's business during April-May, reduced by about 50%. In June, was down about 30%. In July, down maybe 15 to 20%. Since August, we've been running at 100%. Our employees have gone from running anywhere from 16-24 hours a week up to right now, somewhere between 50 to 65 hours a week.

We are now operating at levels of business that we have never seen prior Covid-19 and are very, very busy.

4 PILLARS OF OUR BUSINESS

1- VALUE-ADDED
So Castool, in our way of serving industries, try to give more value to both extruders and die casters globally. By more value,a die caster is basically looking for better castings, faster. The automotive industry, which is the market for a minimum die casting's globally, wants perfect castings cheap. So the best thing that we can do for our customers is help them achieve that.

The same with the extrusion market. They extrude profiles and our mantra for extrusion is better profiles, faster.

2- COST-EFFICIENCY
I'd like to talk a little bit more about value-add in efficiency, and this is just my simple rule for the way we run this company. But on the value-add side, if you can add more value to your customers and your competitors and it doesn't matter how much the value that is, you can typically charge up to about 10% more than your competition.

On the other side, as far as efficiency, if you can be more efficient at actually delivering or reducing your cost, you can probably make a gain up to about 10% on the other side. The spread between maximum value and maximum efficiency in my book is about 20%. So if you are the best in the world consistently, you can probably make about 20%.

The problem is, is if you make 21%, someone will steal your business. So our businesses operate very,very efficiently at about 15 percent with very little exposure because the cost benefit of stealing our business is not there for the competition.

3- MANUFACTURING-EFFICIENCY
The other 50% of our business, which is probably a little bit easier to explain to you and show to you, is delivering the products that we actually sell to our customers, cheaper. This isn't about subcontracting them to China or subcontracting in Vietnam. This is about efficiency of manufacture.

The main materials we use, are steel.Our steel utilization rates are extremely high. Over 90% of all the steel that we buy, we use by putting various components together so our utilization can be high.

Then we'll go through some of the manufacturing methods. We use very, very modern and expensive equipment for some applications… using robotics so that we can get good utilization. In other areas of the business we use actually machinery that is 50 or 60 years old, that's been upgraded to today's specification.

So we tend to try to use the best people, the best equipment, the best technology for the applications.

4- LEARN & EDUCATE
We spend a great deal of time with simulations, with science, with design, with educating, with presenting, doing many, many different things to learn and to educate.

The first thing is to learn and understand our customers business and how our products apply to their business. And secondary is to educate our customers so that they understand how our products affect, can affect their business, giving them better castings faster and then helping them actually do it and then helping them measure it so that they know how they value us.


#UxbridgeChamberOfCommerce #Castool #BusinesPivoting