Even the best-designed product will fail on the market if you haven’t constructed a robust supply chain for its manufacturing. Zebulon Solutions can provide strategic and tactical supply chain support, from BOM scrubs to turnkey supply chain development, process optimization to industrial engineering. We help develop and effectively manage your supply chain and manufacturing. We help you ensure efficiency of costs for raw material and components with vetted suppliers through the early design and manufacturing process and delivery to the customer. Our experienced team works with suppliers big and small around the world to help you pick suppliers who are right for you.

Your company and product are unique. Onshore or offshore, turnkey or consignment, we will help you find the right data-driven solution for your needs.

We can develop your entire supply chain, from PCBs to batteries, enclosures to sensors, and prepare everything for your successful manufacturing, or we can help you optimize one crucial aspect. And like everything we do, we always keep an eye on cost.

Our integrated team of analysts, engineers, quality assurance specialists, and technicians work together to provide a complete supply chain solution, addressing vendors, process, manufacturing, and quality all together.

Specific Supply Chain Services

Contract Manufacturer (CM) Search and Qualification

If you outsource production, your contract manufacturer is your largest and most important supplier. If they do a good job, you do well; if they don’t… Zebulon Solutions has worked with contract manufacturers around the world for decades; our team members have served as executives at billion-dollar multinationals and as customers for small local shops. We know there is no one best solution, you need a CM who is not too large, not too small, a Goldilocks solution.

  • CM requirements definition
  • Identify potential CMs who meet requirements
  • Vet qualified CMs for interest, fit and competence
  • Qualify short-list CMs

Bill of Materials (BOM) Analysis

A BOM lists out all the components in an assembly or system. While for simple products the BOM might be twenty lines long, for complex products it can be ten levels deep and thousands of lines. Completeness and accuracy are key to quoting and building a product, but also to understanding costs, lead times etc. Zebulon Solutions will get your BOM ready for action.

  • BOM assessment
  • BOM scrub
  • BOM finalization

Request for Quotation (RFQ) Management

For key components and assemblies, and of course your CM, you will want to get competitive bids from multiple qualified suppliers. Zebulon Solutions will pull together a complete document package, manage the RFQ process and help you evaluate the results. A clean quote package not only gets you faster and more accurate quotes, but oftentimes lower prices as well, when vendors know you are serious.

  • CM / supplier search (see above)
  • Down-select bid candidates
  • Assemble documentation package
  • Manage RFQ process
  • Evaluate RFQ responses

Supply Chain Management

Supply chains require maintenance, or they weaken and eventually break. Zebulon Solutions can help you manage select vendors or take over the management of your entire supply chain.

  • Prototype and full production sourcing
  • Second sourcing
  • Quarterly business reviews
  • Problem vendor corrective action management
  • Quality audits

Manufacturing and Operations Support

Zebulon Solutions can help you set up and sustain all the support functions that make an operation hum.

  • Forecasting and planning
  • Inventory management
  • Purchasing
  • Lead time tracking and analysis
  • Quality system set up

Process Failure Mode Effect Analysis (PFMEA)

A PFMEA is a highly-structured brainstorming session used to predict what might go wrong with your manufacturing process in the future. While Zebulon Solutions can’t do this in isolation—a successful PFMEA requires active participation from all stakeholders—we will organize and facilitate this analysis. It’s better to figure out what might go wrong before your customers learn about it the hard way.

  • Organize and facilitate a PFMEA
  • Participate with your team as an independent set of eyes
  • Generate reports and action item lists

Manufacturing Engineering

For our customers who insource, or outsource non-standard processes, Zebulon Solutions can provide expert process, test and industrial engineering support. We will help optimize your manufacturing and test processes, work to improve yields and throughput, and drive your process metrics to green.

  • Process optimization
  • Production test development
  • Yield studies
  • Time and motion studies
  • Process validation
  • PPAPs (Product Part Approval Process)

Supply Chain Case Study

CONTRACT MANUFACTURER QUALIFICATION

Zebulon Solutions provided both strategic and tactical supply chain expertise to a global energy storage company with a revolutionary battery technology. We started with a complete manufacturing strategy assessment. From this we formulated a two-stage outsourcing strategy, and identified additional areas where we could help. The first step was to construct a detailed bill of materials (BOM) and identify suppliers, costs, lead times and minimum order quantity. Next we deployed an engineer onsite to help generate a complete documentation package. Finally, we led a contract manufacturer (CM) search.

Selecting the right CM is complicated, but Zebulon Solutions has decades of experience in contract manufacturing from both sides of the table. For this project, we began by collaboratively generating a list of musts and wants: location, type of manufacturing, specialized skillsets, logistics, product size, and target production cost. We then assessed ~ 20 CMs to determine production capacity, capability and interest. In parallel, we developed a Request for Quotation (RFQ), which we sent to qualified CMs along with the BOM and documentation. After analyzing the RFQ responses, face to face discussions and factory inspections were conducted, pricing was negotiated and a CM was selected.

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Specific Questions or Needs?

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Experienced. Trustworthy. Efficient. Pragmatic. Innovative. Optimized. Zebulon Solutions.