Warren Buffett likes to say, “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” In our line of work, I can’t think of a truer statement. I’ve been in this business long enough to know that nobody ever blows a program because the connector cost a few dollars more. Programs get derailed when a shipment shows up late, when a quality issue sends people scrambling, or when “good-enough” customer service turns out not to be good enough at all. The real cost of ownership lives in all the little things around the edges—the things Glenair has spent decades quietly building into our culture.
Take delivery speed. A connector is never just a part number on a bill of materials. It’s a key component that can determine, for example, whether a satellite gets finished in time to meet a launch date, or whether a production line gets ground to a halt or keeps on spinning. Every time we make a shipment from stock, or turn a modification in days instead of weeks, we’re not simply helping a customer— we’re saving them real money.
The same goes for quality. A field failure or rework will eat up the budget ten times faster than the cost of the original hardware ever could. That’s why we put so much emphasis on our testing labs, our documentation discipline, and our vertical integration. When you control your machining, plating, molding, assembly, and test—every last step—you eliminate surprises and improve quality. And doing both is the best path to cost savings there is.
And then there’s customization. Most programs don’t fail because a catalog part was too expensive. They fail because nobody could make the right part fast enough. Glenair’s “tell us exactly what you need and we’ll build it” mentality—plus free fit-check samples and no minimum order requirements—has saved more schedules than most people will ever know. When engineers get 3D models the same day, when they can talk to a real application expert instead of a ticketing system, when they can fit-check a flex assembly in their mockup before they ever cut a PO, those are the moments when cost of ownership really becomes visible.
And here’s something we don’t brag about enough: capacity and stability. Being made in America, being truly vertically integrated, and keeping ample machine time and headroom in every department is not an accident. It’s a philosophy. It means our supply chain doesn’t wobble when the world does. It means that when a customer suddenly needs twice as many assemblies, we don’t tell them, “sorry, see you in 52 weeks.” That reliability—steady, predictable, no-drama reliability—is worth its weight in gold in our industry.
When you add it all up—speed, quality, customization, documentation, engineering support, capacity, and the ease of doing business that comes from working with a manufacturer that has been delivering the goods for over 70 years—you start to see why the cheapest unit price is almost never the best value. In our experience, customers who choose Glenair aren’t looking for a bargain-bin part; they’re looking for peace of mind. They’re looking for the valuerich solution that won’t become the expensive problem later.
As we head into a new calendar year, I want to thank everyone here who makes Glenair the lowest cost-of-ownership interconnect supplier on the planet—not by cutting corners, but by building value into every step of what we do. That, as Mr. Buffett might observe, is a beautiful thing.
This article appears in our January edition of QwikConnect. If you would like to subscribe, please click here.
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