Custom Global Mobility is in the business of selling bespoke cars manufactured from the ground up to meet detailed customer requirements. This includes the body, the engine, the power train, and all other parts of the cars they sell.
Although CGM has no manufacturing facilities and has no knowledge or understanding of automotive technology, it positions itself as a car manufacturer producing high-quality vehicles to satisfy detailed customer requirements. In the process of doing that, however, there are a few things going on that their customers don’t know about.
Because the business model CGM follows does not require them to manufacture vehicles themselves and even explicitly calls for the outsourcing of every aspect of vehicle production, the company is aiming to drastically reduce the costs normally associated with a traditional manufacturing operation by outsourcing everything.
CGM boasts of a global team of automotive experts and claims to have thousands of expert automotive design and manufacturing people on their team, turning out best-in-class cars precisely meeting customer requirements. A look under the CGM hood reveals quite a different story.
Since CGM has no automotive manufacturing personnel, they must find and use vendors to design and manufacture the vehicles they sell. Those tasks are complicated by CGM themselves having almost no expertise in automotive manufacturing or even any knowledge of (and ability to evaluate) automobiles. But they undertake to overcome these deficiencies by what they call smart outsourcing.
Since they lack in-house expertise, even the task of evaluating and certifying vendors is outsourced to other vendors. For a manufacturing vendor, the typical sequence is that a vendor candidate is given manufacturing drawings for an auto part (which are generated by outsourcing to one of CGM’s design vendors) and is asked to deliver a part for evaluation. For example, as a test, CGM might ask a candidate to manufacture a con rod.
Naturally, since CGM cannot judge the quality of the trial con rod and doesn’t itself have an incoming inspection department, it sends the part to another vendor—sometimes a vendor they use just for such very certification—for evaluation. If the test evaluation vendor gives thumbs up, the candidate is certified as a manufacturing vendor for CGM.
Such certified vendors have been able to sell parts or assembled vehicles to CGM under the condition that they use only the machine tools specified by CGM. The use of any other milling machines, lathes, or machining centers, for example, is prohibited.
Although a vendor might have some questions during the process of manufacturing, since CGM is totally unknowledgeable about automotive technology, it cannot themselves answer those questions, and usually tells the vendor to just manufacture in accordance with the drawings. For CGM, going back to the vehicle purchaser, who is not an automotive expert and just wants to buy a car, is not an option, since the purchaser would probably not be able to answer such questions from the CGM vendor and might (correctly) conclude that CGM doesn’t know what it’s doing.
Because of a lack of skilled vendors to work cheaply enough to satisfy CGM, they commonly need to use vendors that produce sub-standard products. Although that might sound problematical, the use of such vendors has actually reduced CGM’s overall manufacturing costs. These defective products are sent to other vendors to repair, followed by an outsourced “quality assurance” process, relying on what CGM calls “automotive quality assurance experts.”
In recent years, CGM has started using an automated manufacturing system to produce fully assembled vehicles in-house. They simply dump the client’s requirements for a vehicle into the system, and out pops an assembled vehicle.
Occasionally (and, more seriously, unpredictably), the automatic vehicle-production system used by CGM builds totally faulty parts into vehicles or assembles them incorrectly, so they use vendors (more of those automotive quality assurance experts) to find and correct these problems, sometimes including re-machining and assembly of numerous parts. CGM finds that the abundant availability of automotive quality assurance experts willing to work cheaply enough—combined with the low cost of the initial manufacturing of vehicles by using their automated in-house manufacturing systems—enables their business model to succeed. And the key to all of this is that the vehicles produced are good enough to satisfy customers and cause no safety problems.
If you are a freelance translator, the above should sound quite familiar. If you are a translation consumer, however, you might not realize what goes on after you order a translation from a translation broker, but be aware that, more and more these days, it is likely to be similar to CGM’s approach to manufacturing vehicles. There are better ways of providing products and services to clients.