Five use cases for Spanflug BUY

Ordering a catalog item takes a few minutes. Ordering a custom precision part usually means going through the same routine: sending requests to several suppliers, comparing quotes, answering questions and following up, often with days of waiting in between. Every extra supplier you ask adds effort and overhead for supplier management and administration. The effort is the same whether the part costs fifty euros or five thousand, and in the end, only one supplier gets the order.

Spanflug BUY streamlines your entire sourcing process, from quote to delivery. For turned, milled and sheet metal parts, you get an instant price and delivery date as soon as you upload the 3D model and drawing. A few more clicks and your order is placed. The task is off your desk right away, all parts on your bill of materials come from one reliable partner, and you only have one vendor to pay.

With Spanflug, ordering custom drawing parts becomes as easy as ordering from a catalog. Fast digital processes and a high level of automation give your team more time for strategic work or for purchasing high-value A parts.

If you build special-purpose machinery, almost every customer project is unique. Your parts list includes turned, milled and sheet metal parts in small quantities, sometimes complete assemblies as well, and everything has to arrive in time for assembly. Especially in small and mid-sized companies, there are rarely enough people to build up a supplier base and source this kind of mix. Purchasing often ends up as an extra task for production planning or the project manager. And when new specifications or requirements come up, the right supplier is simply missing.

This is where Spanflug steps in as your digital purchasing colleague and has your parts made in its partner network. Whether it is a single part or a complete package, you can quickly request prices and delivery dates via the Spanflug platform, often as an instant quote or as a project request for special requirements. You work with one partner instead of a dozen suppliers to cover different processes. Spanflug also coordinates the manufacturing of all parts so that they arrive together and final assembly is not held up by a single missing part.

Tolerances, material and geometry decide much of what a part will cost later on. But usually, you only find out what a design decision really costs once purchasing comes back with a supplier quote.

With Spanflug BUY, your designers can check the cost of every iteration on their own, without waiting for a quote from purchasing. They get instant manufacturability feedback and see the price and delivery time right away. This means design-to-cost decisions are based on real numbers, including real-time material costs, rather than estimates. Once the part is optimized, your engineering team can pass it on to purchasing or order it directly within the guidelines set by purchasing.

Innovative companies have to bring new products to market faster and faster. Your pre-series projects need speed to keep development costs under control and reach product maturity sooner. To help your development team stay both agile and on schedule, Spanflug offers a broad range of manufacturing processes along with available capacity. Your small prototype order does not end up at the bottom of a supplier’s list or your in-house production schedule while the project waits for parts. New part iterations for the next test cycle can be re-quoted quickly. And when volumes grow, repeat orders, series production and call-off orders simply run on the same item you have already saved in your parts library on the platform.

Distributed manufacturing through Spanflug also pays off when your company is growing fast. If you are a scale-up in fields such as robotics or defense, Spanflug supports you during the ramp-up phase, with prototypes and process parts quoted and delivered quickly and your technical data well protected. When your need for parts then grows quickly, your supplier base and purchasing team often cannot keep pace. Finding, qualifying and onboarding suppliers for every process takes time that your project simply does not have. Spanflug works as an extension of your purchasing team and gives you a stable supply chain that grows with your needs.

As a purchasing strategist or digitalization lead, you have a clear goal: digitize procurement, automate routine work and make purchasing leaner. Yet for drawing parts, requests with sensitive technical data are still often emailed to many suppliers around the world. That means a lot of manual work and a security risk as well. This is why moving the sourcing of custom manufactured parts to a digital solution like Spanflug, with a manufacturing network based entirely in the EU, offers so much potential: real efficiency gains, data protection by design and benefits your team will notice quickly in their daily work.

Whether a digitalization project succeeds depends largely on how easily your employees adopt a new tool. That is why Spanflug BUY is built so that ordering is as easy as buying from an online catalog, with no training needed. The platform also connects to your existing purchasing systems via OCI or as a punchout catalog, so your buyers can keep working in the tools and processes they know. One interface, no switching between systems.

For you as a strategist, this is a digitalization step that is quick to implement, without a big investment or a long IT project, and that makes your team’s daily work noticeably easier right from day one.