Reprint from China Fastener World Magazine, Vol. 45

During my first twenty five years in the fastener industry I worked for a fastener manufacturer that focused primarily on automotive fasteners. Several years into my tenure I had the opportunity to work on a project outside of the automotive industry, with a large computer and peripherals manufacturer. After many months of project work it was obvious that the project was dead-on-arrival. This was an uncustomary loss and as I reflected on the reasons for this, the one that stood out above all the others was that we were simply not equipped to support the needs unique to this industry segment. We were very capable of providing the necessary application engineering and had the manufacturing capabilities, but we were too ingrained in our own paradigms and lacked important industry specific knowledge so that we failed to execute properly to meet the customer ́s needs.