Introducing OpusFab: A New Way to Prototype

For 12 years, EPower has been a contract manufacturer with production facilities in China and Thailand. These include 28 CNC machines that have been used mostly for mass production. In that time we've quoted thousands of parts. We've seen the same problem come up again and again, and it has nothing to do with machining.

The Pain of Making Prototypes

Say you need five parts machined. Nothing difficult, just machining and anodizing. The process of getting a quote is a bit more painful than you would have expected. In fact, the amount of time it took to design those five parts was probably quicker than waiting for a quote.

Here's what getting that quote usually looks like:

• Send the drawings and specs to a shop and wait for a response

• Wait a few days for someone to review the files and price the job

• Get the quote back, along with a DFM issue: a wall too thin, a pocket too deep for the tool, a tolerance tighter than the process can hold economically

• Revise the part and resubmit

• Wait again for the shop to re-quote

• Get a PO approved once you finally have a quote you can act on

• Place the order and wait for the parts to actually get made

By the time you're done, a week or more has passed, all before a single chip gets cut.

All of this for an order that might total a few hundred dollars. The dollar amount is small, but the time cost is not. And when you're trying to get a product from prototype to production, every week spent waiting on a quote is a week your launch timeline slips.

This is the part nobody talks about when they talk about manufacturing speed. The machining itself is fast. What's slow is everything that happens before it, such as the emails, the quoting, the DFM back and forth, and the purchasing. And it doesn't stop once you place an order. Customers want to know where their parts are. They'll email asking for a status update, and if you don't have a good answer, they email again a few days later. We were never fast enough to keep up with that, not because the parts weren't moving, but because we had no good way to tell people that they were.

Why We Built OpusFab

Running EPower Corp, we wanted to bring in more business. More prototype orders, more new customers, more relationships that could grow into production work down the line. But we didn't want to grow the manual quoting team to do it. Manual quoting doesn't scale, and it's the exact bottleneck we just described.

So we automated it. Instant quotes. Instant DFM feedback, so you find out about a wall thickness or tolerance issue the moment you upload the part, not a week later in an email. Live status tracking once you've purchased, so you always know where your parts are without having to ask.

OpusFab is the platform we built to do this. But it's not a marketplace sitting on top of a network of shops we don't control. OpusFab is built directly on EPower Corp. Every order placed through OpusFab moves into EPower Corp's own facilities to get made. That's what makes OpusFab vertically integrated instead of just another quoting front end: the same operation that gives you an instant quote is the one running the machines, so there's no handoff, no second company to negotiate with, and no guessing whether the shop behind the quote can actually deliver. 

It's also why we can move a company from prototype to production faster than a typical marketplace can. There's one team, one set of machines, and one continuous process from your first quote through your production run.

A quick example of what instant DFM feedback looks like in practice: say you upload a part with a pocket wall at 0.3mm. Instead of finding out three days later after a quote request sits in someone's inbox, OpusFab flags it the moment you upload the file, tells you the minimum wall thickness the process can hold, and lets you decide whether to adjust the part or proceed with the tradeoff. You're not stuck waiting on a person to notice it and email you back.

How It Works

1. Register at opusfab.com

2. Upload your part (STEP files work best)

3. Get an instant quote and DFM feedback so you know right away if anything needs adjusting

4. Purchase when you're ready

5. Watch your parts get made, with live status updates the whole way through

Conclusion

If you're tired of waiting days for a quote, and even longer once a DFM issue sends you back to the drawing board, give OpusFab a try. Register at OpusFab.com and start uploading parts today.