Case Studies

Customer:
Leading global solar tracker OEM

Business Problem:
Australia is emerging as a desirable market for solar, and trackers in particular, and our customer was trying to figure out how to enter the market. There were very few local suppliers of the necessary components, the costs were prohibitively high, and Australia had cumbersome import tariffs and rules.

Solution:
Unimacts used its trade attorneys in the USA and Australia to quickly understand the local market regulations. From Unimacts’ prior experience and engineering product knowledge, Unimacts was able to redesign the product and assemblies to reduce the product cost, reduce the field cost and conform to the regulations without incurring prohibitively high tariffs.

Benefits:
By engaging with Unimacts, our customer quickly, profitably, and easily entered a new growth market worth over $10MM in the first year alone and grew to $50MM+ in new revenue. In addition to the revenue growth, the Unimacts solution allowed our customer to deliver significant value to the Australian market while maintaining their expected margins.

Customer:
Leading European Wind Turbine OEM

Business Problem:
Due to changing global supply chains, our customer found themselves in a sole-source situation with a high-cost supplier. And the product, substantial fiberglass wind turbine nacelles, is challenging and expensive to ship.

Solution:
Because the customer had worked with Unimacts on various projects and knew our team, they came to us with their problem and asked us for a solution. Unimacts was able to find an old fiberglass factory that had recently gone out of business, and Unimacts purchased the old factory and brought it back to life to serve the customer. The final solution we ended up with was a hybrid supply chain with Unimacts producing the larger parts in the factory in Spain, importing smaller components from a low-cost supplier in India, and then kitting and assembling into a solution in Spain to deliver to the customer.

Benefits:
The Unimacts global solution enables the customer to achieve 10% savings, de-risk their supply chain by having a local second source and develop another global low-cost source for new smaller products.

Customer:
Major global construction equipment OEM

Business Problem:
Our customer was experiencing rapid global growth, and the supply chain could not keep up with demand. Our customer needed to outsource a low-value add welding process to free up space in its main plant in the USA and parallel ramp up production in its factory in China. The additional issue was that this manufacturing process was technically complicated and was poorly documented (significant “tribal knowledge”).

Solution:
Unimacts sent its local us engineers to the customer factory to study and understand the current in-house process. With the help of the customer, we were able to document the existing process fully and then work with one of our partners in China to localize the operation and upgrade the process to robotic welding rather than traditional manual welding.

Benefits:
By launching production of this highly complex product in China, our customer captured an additional $25mm in sales from China, increased the output of other products from its US factory, grew sales by $10mm, and reduced costs by 15%.

Customer:
US-based EPC firms

Business Problem:
“Piles” are part of the steel support structure underneath every solar power plant in the world. The cost of solar is being driven down to historically low costs, while the prices for steel and shipping are at historic highs. The EPCs in the USA are looking for suppliers who can provide short lead times AND low cost.

Solution:
Unimacts has its own piles factory in North America (Mexico) and has delivered relatively quickly and at a low cost, but that only solved a small portion of the problem. Unimacts then took its knowledge of the market and how to produce the product and developed two new supply partner factories in India to meet demand across the USA.

Benefits:
Because of Unimacts’ global footprint, we can now offer customers anywhere in the USA fast response (less than eight week lead time) and low cost (10% or more below market rates). Unimacts is currently the only steel pile supplier in the market that can offer such a solution.