(101b) To Toll or Not to Toll: That Is the Question

• the recovery of international production capacity following its devastation during the Second World War;
• the revolution in communications;
• the revolution in transportation.

The first result means that global production is at an all-time high: everybody is producing everything. The communications revolution means that everybody can market globally, cheaply via a Website on the World Wide Web. The transportation revolution means that product moves almost anywhere for almost no cost. The above bullets sum to a tremendous increase in commercial competition since the early 1990’s.

One way to confront this increased competition is to reduce process and product “cycle time”, where cycle time means the period between invention and commercialization. The shorter cycle time is, the faster product enters a given market. Using contract manufacturing is one method for reducing cycle time in the chemical processing industry.

This presentation discusses the “in and outs” of using contract manufacturing to reduce cycle time in the chemical processing industry. This presentation is the result of twenty-five years’ experience at using contract manufacturing to reduce cycle time.