An honest way to decide, from the side of the table that does the building
Libra Industries, Dayton, Ohio
Most of the conversations we have about final assembly start the same way. The floor is full. A new program has landed; the existing product still has to ship, and the line that builds it is taking the space, people, and test time the new program needs. The question underneath is whether to keep building it themselves or hand it to someone like us.
We are a systems integration site, so you would expect us to say outsource. Sometimes that is the wrong answer, and we would rather say so here than find out six months into a transfer.
The signs it is worth doing
Your volume swings, and you staff for the peak. If your assembly team is stretched for three months and underused for the next three, you are paying for capacity you only need part of the year. A partner who builds for several customers can absorb that swing in a way a single line can’t.
Floor space is what’s holding up the next program. This is the most common reason we hear, and it is a good one. A mature product that ships every week is usually the easiest thing in the building to move, and the space it frees is worth more to you than the margin on building it.
Your engineers are on the line. When design engineers spend their week troubleshooting builds and chasing late parts, the cost doesn’t show up on the assembly line. It shows up as the next product being late.
Test is the bottleneck. Plenty of companies can assemble faster than they can test. If units are waiting on one function test station, or burn-in is setting your ship rate, that is a capacity problem a partner with test stations already running can take off your hands.
The BOM has outgrown purchasing. Hundreds of purchased parts, dozens of suppliers, and a steady flow of engineering changes is a full-time job for a team, not a side task for one buyer. Transform the purchased BOM into a single purchased, tested assembly.
You need certifications you don’t have. If a new customer or market requires AS9100, ISO 13485, ITAR handling, or a cleanroom build, building that certification or capability yourself is a multi-year project. Borrowing it is faster.
When keeping it in-house is right
The assembly is where your know‑how lives. If the alignment, calibration, or tuning step is what makes your product better than the competition, that step is your intellectual property. Keep it close.
The design is still moving every week. Outsourcing a design that changes constantly means paying a partner to run your change process. Wait until changes settle, or at least come in batches.
Volume is too low or too irregular to carry the transfer. Moving a build has a real cost: documentation, fixtures, test equipment, first article, and a second learning curve. If you build a handful of units a year, that investment may never pay back.
Nobody on your side can own the relationship. A partner needs a named person who answers questions, approves changes, and reviews the data. If no one has that time, the transfer will struggle no matter who you pick.
What moving actually costs
We want to be straight about this because it is where expectations go wrong. The first months after a transfer are rarely cheaper than building it yourself. Both sites may be building in parallel. Fixtures and test equipment are duplicated or moved. Documentation is written for steps your team has always just known. The savings come after the line is stable, and they come from the floor space, the engineering time, and the flexibility, more than from the unit price.
What to own either way
Even when the build is fully outsourced, a few things should stay yours.
- Design authority and the change process. A partner can suggest changes. You approve them.
- Acceptance criteria. A written definition of a good unit, not one that lives in someone’s head.
- Visibility into critical suppliers. Especially single-source parts. If one of them slips, you should hear about it the same day we do.
- Field data. Returns and failures need a path back to your engineers.
- A named owner. One person on your side who runs the relationship.
What to settle before the first build
Most of the trouble we have seen in a new program traces back to something nobody decided at the start. Who owns the BOM and approved alternates. Who buys the long lead parts, and with whose money. Who writes and maintains the test procedures, and who owns the test equipment. How changes are submitted, costed, and approved. What gets serialized and tracked. How units are packed, labeled, and shipped. How the forecast is shared, and how often.
Whoever builds it, settle each of these in writing before the first unit goes down the line.
How we look at it in Dayton
We build everything from subassemblies to fully tested systems here, with machining, fabrication, and tool and die on the same campus, and an ISO 7 cleanroom for the builds that need one. That helps once a program is here. It isn’t a reason to outsource, and we wouldn’t want anyone to move a build because of it.
If you are weighing this, the best step is a conversation before anything moves. Bring the BOM and whatever build documents you have, and we will tell you plainly whether we think it should move and what it would take.
Send an email to sales@libraind.com.
