Dealing witih Overseas OEMs
Dealing witih Overseas OEMs
(OP)
How would you handle the following situation:
The projects group in your plant is going to buy a compressor or a pump and in going out for bid some OEMs from outside the country submit fair quotes. They are considered and look like good choices for the service in question. Being a reliability centered and practical sort of person, you want to be sure that as much of the piece of equipment can be easily found nearby, so you ask for a seal, coupling, bearing seal as many of the parts as possible to be from vendors you aleady have relationships with. You ask for these parts to be sourced locally. You know that the offering from the OEM will be from the international arms of the companies you already deal with anyhow. The OEM comes back and tells you that they cannot comply due to warrantee issues. Or they say that the lead time for the equipment will increase by several months and that the price will increase by several tens of thousands of dollars.
The projects group in your plant is going to buy a compressor or a pump and in going out for bid some OEMs from outside the country submit fair quotes. They are considered and look like good choices for the service in question. Being a reliability centered and practical sort of person, you want to be sure that as much of the piece of equipment can be easily found nearby, so you ask for a seal, coupling, bearing seal as many of the parts as possible to be from vendors you aleady have relationships with. You ask for these parts to be sourced locally. You know that the offering from the OEM will be from the international arms of the companies you already deal with anyhow. The OEM comes back and tells you that they cannot comply due to warrantee issues. Or they say that the lead time for the equipment will increase by several months and that the price will increase by several tens of thousands of dollars.





RE: Dealing witih Overseas OEMs
"Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater."
Albert Einstein
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RE: Dealing witih Overseas OEMs
The other option is to buy and maintain a decent local inventory of the service parts the offshore OEM prefers. The cost of doing that should also be considered in the sourcing decision.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Dealing witih Overseas OEMs
To ask the bidder after bidding to construct the plant using parts that are available from local vendors is an interesting option but not a fair bidding process.
Perhaps you need to sort out your bidding procedures, specifications and selection criteria and invite new bids.
RE: Dealing witih Overseas OEMs
A lot of the equipment we source, we ask tenderers to include costed options for us to buy spares off them for the expected life of the equipment (so they may quote us a price for a new mech seal valid for this year, another price for next year and so on) - with associated guaranteed turnround times. This gives us a better idea of the through-life cost to rank the bids against. If an overseas bidder can show how he's going to comply with these turnround times and his bid is still competitive given projected spares usage then there's a good chance he's going to get the work.
A.