At a time when reshoring is top of the agenda following the Covid-19 lockdown, Bedford-based Challenge (Europe) Ltd is highlighting its partnership capabilities for sourcing and supply chain management of threaded fasteners on a specialist basis. This covers threaded products and related items from screws and bolts to nuts, washers, security fasteners, inserts and custom fasteners.

The company is able to partner with assemblers/manufacturers where it offers contributions to cost control and pricing strategies by minimising administration costs, achieved by applying experience and appropriate technology — for example vendor managed inventory. This enables it to deploy pay-as-you-use charging so reducing customer inventory costs to spread cashflow and, by dealing with environmental issues, to minimise the impact of manufacturing processes.

In addition to ex-stock programmed supply, Challenge (Europe) assists partners by responding to urgent or short-term custom manufacturing of fasteners from its own in-house facility. This capability is ideal for small quantities and extends to partnering arrangements with fabricators and finishers so that they can cover a wide range of items from specialist threaded fasteners to sheet metal or cast fixings.

This capability enables the company to produce components from alternative materials at short notice and to incorporate them into packaged sub-assemblies which allows customers to gain a complete package of high-quality and low-cost on standard mass-produced items and on small quantity specialist components.

A typical specialist partnership can therefore include in-house machining coupled with a global sourcing and supply infrastructure supported by its in-depth expertise of the manufacturing cycle gained from over 30 years in the engineering sector.