Rising demands for quality and a shortening of product life cycles are prompting manufacturers to order extra services from aluminum extruders, industry executives said.

For extruders that can provide extra services, downstream processing can mean charging customers by the part instead of by the pound. It also facilitates recycling of scrap and reduces questions on accountability for quality.

Although several extruders have been focusing on value-added work for more than a decade, the trend has accelerated in recent years, according to Donn W. Sanford, president of the Aluminum Extruders Council. "For the past two to three years, there's been a growing number of extruders adding value-added services at the request of their customers," Sanford said. "More extruders are offering the services, and the ones already offering them are offering more services.

"There's a tremendous surge in quality concerns. Quality control and time are big factors driving the downstream movement."

Shortened product life cycles are spurring the need for timely services, according to Dick Smith, president of Mideast Aluminum Industries, Mountaintop, Pa., a division of Indal Inc.

"If you can offer a variety of machines for extra processing, you can help a customer get a product to market quickly," Smith explained. "The customer doesn't have to invest in the machines because you can provide the service. If the product really takes off, then the customer may buy the equipment to process in house."

Providing value-added processing has been part of Mideast's strategy since its founding some 20 years ago, and it has been gradually adding to its services ever since, Smith said.

Improving service is the rationale for an upgrade now under way at Mideast. The company is adding 130,000 square feet to its extrusion and finishing plant. This work is part of a project to consolidate Mideast's Dayton, N.J., plant into the Mountaintop facility.

While Mideast's value-added processing helps some customers bring new products to market quickly, the services are being demanded by customers who wish to simplify existing manufacturing operations, as well.

"We're seeing a lot of customers who are finding it less cost-effective to do their own finishing in house as part of manufacturing and assembly operations," Smith said. "If they have the extruder do the work, they don't have to worry about dealing with scrap or meeting tolerances."

Precision Extrusion Inc., Bensenville, Ill., also is seeing a pickup in requests for value-added services from manufacturers looking to simplify their operations.

"Adding services makes for one-stop shopping," said Richard Zihm, the company's president. Manufacturers "don't have to send parts on to a fabricator or a finisher before they can use them. And with value-added parts, you don't have to worry about blame assessment if something out of specification arrives on the line."

An extruder in the Southeast concurred. "Once they get a part from us, it can go right into a machining center or right out onto the line," the extruder said. "In the past two years, we've seen a tremendous increase in requests for value-added processing."

Mideast's Smith said that providing downstream processing places a big responsibility on aluminum extruders because parts that are out of specification can be costly.

"Customers want rejection rates in parts per million," he said. "If you take an extrusion that would cost $1.10 a pound, then add $50 of machining per part, you don't want to scrap it."

Such quality concerns are what drives customers to ask for more from their extruders, according to Jim Sharpe, president of Extrusion Technology, Randolph, Mass. He said that turning to downstream processing helped the company reorganize and emerge from Chapter 11 creditor protection in the late 1970s.

"Having an extruder do value-added work initially looks more expensive, so some companies try to cut costs by doing work in house," Sharpe said. "After a while, a lot of these customers become willing to pay more for services so that they don't have to pay for mistakes."

Only about one-third of Extrusion Technology's investment is in extrusion equipment, Sharpe said, revealing that 85 percent of the company's business comes from customers seeking value-added services.

"The rest of our investment is in machining operations," he said. "We've become more focused on running our machining operations instead of being just an extruder."

The drive toward downstream processing is spurring an interest in the new 9000 regulations of the International Standards Organization (ISO), extruders said. The ISO 9000 standards were adopted by member nations of the European Community to ensure the quality of goods moving across borders as trade barriers were removed.

"A lot of companies coming to the U.S. are looking for this certification in their suppliers," said Mideast's Smith. "We currently are going through quite a learning process to get certified."