Dealing witih Overseas OEMs 1

[longeron]

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.

 

[Ashereng]

When you go our for bid, you also have your criteria set ahead of time to evaluate the tender packages. If these issues are in your criteria, evaluate and score it appropriately. If they were not in your original criteria, well, now you need to think a bit as it seems you have an issue.



"Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater."
Albert Einstein
Have you read FAQ731-376 to make the best use of Eng-Tips Forums?

 

[MikeHalloran]

Just be sure your cost comparison includes the price difference associated with local parts sourcing for your convenience, and that it also includes the cost of delay.

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

 

[BRIS]

The majority of the world buys pumps and compressors and other Plant on the interantional market. Standard bidding procedures pay particular attention to mainteance and require bidders to submit recommendations and prices for spare parts, details of local sources of spare parts etc. selection is made on the most economical favourable (over the design life) not least purchase cost.

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.

 

[zeusfaber]

I think BRIS is spot on here. As soon as you start re-engineering a tenderer's product, you might as well not have run a competition in the first place - and through-life cost matters.

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.