WHERE TO DRAW THE LINE BETWEEN IN-HOUSE AND OUTSOURCED PRODUCTION
BY NIKOLAUS MRONCZ, HEAD OF SALES ENGINEERING AT XOMETRY.
Every manufacturer, from ten-person startups to established mid-caps, eventually faces the same commercial question: which parts of production should stay in-house, and which should go to a specialist partner? Get it right and a business scales on schedule. Get it wrong, and a single miscalculated component can delay a launch, blow a budget, or, worse, put a product’ s route to market entirely at risk. For machine builders and automation OEMs, that question reaches well beyond the headline product, to the enclosures, housings, guards, brackets and control cabinet components that surround it.
This isn’ t a technical question so much as a commercial one. It’ s about risk allocation, capital exposure and delivery certainty, and too many manufacturing leaders still treat it as an afterthought rather than a strategic decision taken early.
When“ core competency” isn’ t obvious
Many engineering-led businesses instinctively keep production in-house wherever possible. It feels like control. In practice, it is often exposure.
Take injection moulding as an example. From the outside, it looks straightforward: design a part, build a mould, run production. In reality, it has failure modes that rarely show up until a business has already committed capital: wall thicknesses that trap stress, draft angles that won’ t release a part cleanly, and material flow that behaves differently in production than in simulation. For a business that has already taken pre-orders or set a regulatory deadline, any one of these can decide whether it meets or misses a launch date.
We saw this play out with Batterieschmiede, a small German battery technology company bringing a lithium battery system to market. Its product had to pass UN38.3, the transportation safety test that any battery-powered device faces before it can be shipped. The most fragile part of the assembly, and the part carrying the most regulatory risk, was a component the team had initially tried to develop in-house. It didn’ t hold up.
46 MACHINERY, AUTOMATION, CONTROL & ENGINEERING