06.10.25
| 3 min read
When Growth Creates Complexity: A Firearm Manufacturer’s Challenge
As one of the largest firearms manufacturers in the U.S., this company relies on precise thermal processing to bring its metal injection molded (MIM) components—like hammers, triggers, and safety selectors—to final spec. But as order volumes surged, so did a hidden cost: operational inefficiency.
Each month, the manufacturer was generating hundreds of purchase orders (POs) for outsourced heat treating. Their ERP system struggled to reconcile per-pound pricing with variable minimum charges and fluctuating shipments. The result? Invoicing delays, mismatched data, and significant manual effort to manage discrepancies.
Background
The manufacturer trusts Paulo with millions of parts a year, primarily consisting of metal injection molded components made from 4605 and 8620 alloys, with a small subset of stainless steel. The components required a variety of heat treating processes to bring them to spec.
- Carburizing
- Neutral hardening
- Vacuum annealing for stainless components
- Black oxide coating
We had nearly a decade of successful partnership under our belt before the challenge surfaced—a track record that gave them full confidence that we would be willing to listen, collaborate, and help optimize their systems to remove the PO bottleneck.
The Solution: Aligning Pricing with ERP Logic
The Paulo team stepped back to assess the root cause: the current per-pound pricing model, while standard in the industry, was out of sync with the customer’s ERP structure and administrative workflow.
Instead of refining a flawed system, we recommended a new approach: per-piece pricing.
This model allowed the manufacturer to:
- Issue blanket POs covering large, multi-month volumes (e.g., 1 million parts)
- Send incremental releases against those POs (e.g., 10,000 pieces at a time)
- Ensure invoice consistency, eliminating the need for manual intervention or corrections.
“This eliminated the need for a dedicated employee just to manage heat treat POs,” said the Paulo expert on the project. “It improved billing consistency and saved the customer significant time and money.”
The Results: Efficiency That Scaled with Growth
By evolving their pricing model and PO structure, our team helped this manufacturer unlock substantial internal efficiencies while positioning both teams to support increased volume with confidence. Order volumes grew 4X with reduced administrative burden.
Providing Value Beyond the Furnace
By taking a collaborative, systems-aware approach to customer challenges, our team is committed to helping large manufacturers and tiered suppliers with reducing costs, eliminating friction, and scaling their business more effectively.
If you’re looking to streamline your heat treating operations and ordering processes, connect with one of our experts today.
