There are way too many other places to save money fixing inefficiencies in a machining business besides tool costs.
Indeed but its a bottom line item that shows up on every monthly budget / finance review so its always in (mis)mangements face. Getting the bean counters to understand that cost accounting at that level is the purview of engineers, not accountants whose sole useful function in this context is to flick the balls on the abacus. Real management gets this. Chair warmers and meeting hoppers don't.
Objectively HASS sets its stall out as selling commodity machines for the "average range" of work. So selling a tooling package as part of the one stop shop approach makes a lot of sense.
In many ways its good from the tooling vendors point of view too. Although average generally may, at best, "do" for the job specialist tooling can always be found that will be better for a shops specific range of jobs. Knowing the performance of the package sold with the machine makes it much easier to upsell usefully better equipment. When competing with a vendor supplied package which will invariably be, like the curates egg, good in parts depending on the experience of the folk buying the machine, experience of the supplier and how good the horizontal holds on their crystal balls are its a lot harder. Most especially so when you have tooling capability overlaps.
For a lot of folk machine purchase is still far too close to the early days of car buying when you ordered a chassis, had it sent to the body builders and trotted along later to spend hours discussing colours, upholstery lights et al. Mighty Big Industrial Corp ltd. et al have departments for this. Normal shop owners just want the beast on the floor making parts.
Just so long as no one picks up the Harley Davidson business model. Buy a bike, throw half of it away and replace with Screaming Eagle "performance" bits (with no refund on the new stuff removed) then take a swift detour through the clothing department to get colour matched everything. So the factory and dealer double their profit but the business ethics seem .... um ... .
Er. What colour did you say HASS are using for the colour matched shop coat set?
Clive