Mfg.com

Is anyone using MFG.com?
Has it worked out for the better or a waste of money and time?
Looking to see if it is worth the investment or time.
Seems like a lot of cash up from.
Has anyone had success from this?
Or is everything going for pennies.

You can do a search here as this has come up many times.

In short,

Yes a limited few have done well with it, some developed a good customer or two from it.

Others, like me, paid a good amount of money for it. We quoted a ton of quotes and found out very often that items Awarded went at very low prices. On several occasions I worked the better part of a week submitting quotes I thought I was very aggressive on only to find I could not purchase the material at the cost the parts went for.
As to just using to get our foot in the door of an establishment...nobody but nobody wanted to talk or go over prints, needs, tolerance, alternatives.

I had better luck going cold calling and just walking into businesses.

But they have been around awhile, so somebody is working with them and I assume doing ok. Read in a few periodicals about shops getting work...just did not work for me.

I had the same experience as SIM. That was about 5 yrs ago.

I tried Xometry.com last winter and gave up on it. My take on Xometry is it seemed better for fab shops and people working out of their garage(lower overhead type of businesses). At least there your shown a price and if you like it, you take the job. If you don't, you can through out an offer and they may or may not take it. If you were going to go a route, I would try this over MFG.com. As you only have to make a sample part to send them to get on their approved supplier list.

AARONT said:

I had the same experience as SIM. That was about 5 yrs ago.

I tried Xometry.com last winter and gave up on it. My take on Xometry is it seemed better for fab shops and people working out of their garage(lower overhead type of businesses). At least there your shown a price and if you like it, you take the job. If you don't, you can through out an offer and they may or may not take it. If you were going to go a route, I would try this over MFG.com. As you only have to make a sample part to send them to get on their approved supplier list.

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Why are you comparing MFG to Xometry? MFG is a paid service that requires a $3k-$5k commitment , Xometry is free. WTF is wrong with you?

I have had parts made on mfg.com. It has worked out really well. The last part I did was a 1 inch diameter aluminum part that held a small slitting saw we needed 1000 of them. I have paid as much as 10 dollars each locally for a hundred and before that I was cranking them out on a hardinge turret lathe. I got quotes from 20 companies the price ranged from 9 dollars each to 30 cents each in mexico and 20 cents each in china. I gave the job to a guy in michigan at 1.42 each he cranked them out in 2 weeks and they were perfect. I have struggled to get stuff done for years even with large orders. This has made it so easy.

Dualkit said:

Why are you comparing MFG to Xometry? MFG is a paid service that requires a $3k-$5k commitment , Xometry is free. WTF is wrong with you?

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I didn't compare anything. I brought up Xometry to give the OP a better option than MFG if he wanted to go the internet route. You know, so he doesn't have to waste the $3k investment.

Why are you such an asshole?

Is anyone using MFG.com? - Tried it.
Has it worked out for the better or a waste of money and time? - Waste of both.
Looking to see if it is worth the investment or time. - Waste of both.
Seems like a lot of cash up from. - Not sure what this means?
Has anyone had success from this? - I did not.
Or is everything going for pennies. - Everything is going for pennies.

You'd be better off putting an ad on Craig's List................

Hitting the pavement and knocking on doors would be 100x's easier(and cheaper) than MFG.com.

I actually have one customer that came from MFG.com back in 2005(?). It took quoting hundreds of jobs before a few stuck. And even after getting a few jobs, it dwindled down to just that one customer. It was the hardest won customer I ever had. Sure they are a pretty decent account today, around $100k+ gross/year. But they are a complete and total fluke. A needle in a haystack. I played the odds and won, but I wouldn't ever expect it to happen again. If I was to do it over, I'd cold call until the phone melts outa my hand and hit the road with my best salesman face.

Our company purchased a subscription for this service around 2006. Biggest waste of money and time we've ever had. I quoted 100s of jobs.
Only won one award for about $900 to a NASA research project.
What a joke. The awards in many cases were for less than I quoted for material. I don't see how anyone does work that cheap.
That was 13 years ago too..... I think their sales reps called me for like 5 years trying to get me to resubscribe...

mcbassin said:

Our company purchased a subscription for this service around 2006. Biggest waste of money and time we've ever had. I quoted 100s of jobs.
Only won one award for about $900 to a NASA research project.
What a joke. The awards in many cases were for less than I quoted for material. I don't see how anyone does work that cheap.
That was 13 years ago too..... I think their sales reps called me for like 5 years trying to get me to resubscribe...

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In a round-a-bout way it's a conduit for China to send work here. Tons of prints that were DOD type stuff, clearly marked, USA only type wording went for less than material cost.

Some guy in an office in CA, or really anywhere, pricing all that stuff with China, adding a markup then winning the business.

Since this guy is a US based company it all flies. Nobody investigates that kind of thing even though there's red flags all over it.

My MFG.com story.. From 2002 or 2006... Previous place of employment.

Quote Quote Quote Quote Quote.. For a month of so, I'd put in about
10 hours a week, quoting quoting quoting quoting quoting... It
started out as more hours, but we all got discouraged...

They would let you see the award price, IF it was awarded, and were
all the other pricing landed.. There was always a few way out in left
field Super high.. Generally I came in a bit below the median, at the
low end of the cluster in the center..

Never got a job.. And like others have said, the prices they are awarded for
are usually less than material cost...

So.. The company cancelled the credit card that the "subscription" was billed to.

And then we decided to get our money back, for the subscription, and all the hourly
pay I got for quoting quoting quoting..

Put up a few jobs, got them done for pennies on the dollar.. And then we quit..
It felt DIRTY.. And I really think that the people that won anything only bid
super low to see if they could actually get a job on there.. Who the hell is going
to bid 39 cents each for 60 parts, and supply material????

The whole thing was a giant waste of time..

Supplier nightmare
Great for getting parts made for nothing in china, but no way to get your money back from china if no delivery.

Don't waste your money, my company did and got nothing useful out of it.

I used it. Really didn't work for me. I did much better driving around with a box of business cards, a bottle of water and a bag lunch.

My horror story with MFG.
In 98 Mitch Free was the Gibbs Cam dealer in Atlanta. I bought the full package with training onsite for 2 weeks. I forget how much but was well over 10k plus putting there instructor up in a nice hotel in Chattanooga for 2 weeks. During the training Mitch drove up and gave me the pitch on MFG “a great new way to connect with new customers”. Well, it sounded good at the time so why not? I payed the fee for a year upfront and the RFQ’s just rolled in, so many I put on an estimator full time. I will skip the part of him closing the Gibbs office the next week.

The estimator I put on kept telling me something was wrong because he was putting out hundreds of quotes and we couldn’t get a nibble. It was quite obvious that what people where doing is putting the RFQ’s out and then using the lowest price they received quoting in their own shop. We kept quoting for the year and I think we may have only got two or three wins for bottom of the bucket jobs.

Of course I didn’t renew but always kept track of what this guy was doing. For a while he moved the office to China so you can bet China was sending RFQ’s out to see what price they had to beat. Now, all of a sudden in 2013 he comes back to USA and steps down from CEO of MFG to open a massive shop that does everything from machine work to additive manufacturing. Now you have a Chinese national running MFG and Mitch running Zici Manufacturing in Atlanta. So, where do you think the work for his factory comes from? This clearly gives him the choice to pick and choose the cream puff jobs from mfg all while Joe shop owner pays a huge yearly fee to get the scraps.

If you figure by the time you chunk out 6-8k for the service and then your time for quoting the jobs you could put on a salesman to make cold calls for you. Pay the guy a draw with commission and profit sharing and you would be much better off. Not to mention when you quote a lot of jobs you tend to have to get quotes for materials and tooling. It’s only a matter of time before your distributors drop you for so many RFQ’s that they don’t get to sell you.

g-coder05 said:

Of course I didn’t renew but always kept track of what this guy was doing. For a while he moved the office to China so you can bet China was sending RFQ’s out to see what price they had to beat. Now, all of a sudden in 2013 he comes back to USA and steps down from CEO of MFG to open a massive shop that does everything from machine work to additive manufacturing. Now you have a Chinese national running MFG and Mitch running Zici Manufacturing in Atlanta. So, where do you think the work for his factory comes from? This clearly gives him the choice to pick and choose the cream puff jobs from mfg all while Joe shop owner pays a huge yearly fee to get the scraps.

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I'm afraid that I may be a wee bit too dense to follow your road map.

Not saying that I am flying any flags for Mitch here, but how on Earth do I connect these dots to come up with him taking cream off the top of posted jobs?

Doo to his connections - he gits to look at the posted jobs prior to anyone else, and if he is interested, then he quotes his price, and then 300 bogus quotes are made up that are all higher than his - with longer lead times?

Also - then he knows which jobs are real and which are searching for better pricing - only to beat down the current supplier - so he doesn't waste time and $ on those?

Please fill in the blanks for me.

Besides, if this is a problem for you, then how is it that you are apparently stationed in China as a full time gig at the present?


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Think Snow Eh!
Ox

Ox said:

I'm afraid that I may be a wee bit too dense to follow your road map.

Not saying that I am flying any flags for Mitch here, but how on Earth do I connect these dots to come up with him taking cream off the top of posted jobs?

Doo to his connections - he gits to look at the posted jobs prior to anyone else, and if he is interested, then he quotes his price, and then 300 bogus quotes are made up that are all higher than his - with longer lead times?

Also - then he knows which jobs are real and which are searching for better pricing - only to beat down the current supplier - so he doesn't waste time and $ on those?

Please fill in the blanks for me.

Besides, if this is a problem for you, then how is it that you are apparently stationed in China as a full time gig at the present?


------------------------

Think Snow Eh!
Ox

Click to expand...

Ok, let me start from the bottom. I’m not really stationed anywhere. I commented on a post a few days ago about tariffs and someone told me to change my location because I was posting from China. I no longer own a machine shop in USA so I do contract process engineering. I jump all over Asia every week, just like tonight I’m in Subic Bay Philippines helping set a shop up on the old American naval base. In the past 7 years traveling all over China, Cambodia,Vietnam,Taiwan, and the Philippines I have seen countless amounts of shops using MFG, rfqline, emachinine, ect just to get someone to bid the work then they cut the price by a few percent then submit and do it in there own shop. China and Taiwan are the absolute worst. This just proves my theory about how these sites are used. How nice is it to just have to glance at a quote and then the prices someone else bids and say “yep, I can make money even 2% cheaper” after ten other shops bid it and basically did the costing for it? You would think this would be a gamble but when a Chinese shop is paying a 5axis machinist with 5 or more years experience programming with a pirated copy of NX or Delcam ¥4500 ($650} per month for 10 hour days 6 days a week it’s hard to loose.

As as far as Mitch getting to see the prices and pick? No, I can’t say for 100% certainty but I’m not willing to gamble $6000 per year plus several hours per day just looking at quotes. If you had a website that is making 25 million per year, operated by Chinese interns, why would you even consider going through the whole process of starting a new facility from the ground up without having a leg up on the competition?

So as I see it, this would be like having all of my competitors quotes right in front of me and having the ability to choose the jobs with the highest margins with the least risk. As unethical as this is you don’t get Forbes to call you a serial entrepreneur and the maverick of the manufacturing world without being a little unethical .

edit, the money figures came from an interview that Mitch did with CNN money.