OEMs looking for machinery manufacturing have found a home at PEKO. For over 55 years, we have been providing superior contract manufacturing services to support the capital equipment needs of OEMs. As an award-winning machinery manufacturing company, our people are experts at building machinery for prominent industry names and up-and-coming innovators alike. Our comprehensive suite of manufacturing processes and ancillary services is what sets us apart. This vertical integration provides for a turnkey contract manufacturing solution, enabling us to bring new machinery from the early product life cycle stages to full-rate production and to successfully manage all phases of the machine lifecycle while also meeting your price, quality, and delivery objectives. All finished machine builds are assembled, tested, and shipped right from our facility in Rochester, NY, USA.
For the majority of our capital equipment customers, we develop, build, and optimize complete machine systems, then deliver up to a few hundred of these custom machines per year. Our experienced engineering and manufacturing teams can work from your functional specifications, scope of work, or build-to-print documentation package to provide custom machinery solutions that are as specialized as the products they are helping create. These complex systems help improve existing processes, reduce resource requirements, and increase operational efficiency, all coordinated by a responsive team you won’t get from other industrial machinery manufacturing companies. Our flexible yet comprehensive industrial perspective allows us to effectively work with customers of any size, including billion-dollar corporations and early-stage startups, in a wide range of industries, including semiconductor, life science, medical devices, renewable energy, chemical processing, defense, material handling, telecommunications, and more.
How do I find a contract manufacturer for my manufacturing equipment and machinery? PEKO is here to help answer this question by compiling a list of common considerations. We’ve spoken with hundreds of industry professionals – program managers, manufacturing managers, engineers and sourcing specialists - who have evaluated contract manufacturing for their machinery or equipment and are ready to share some insight with this guide.
An important part of being a custom machinery builder is having a mixture of both manufacturing and engineering expertise. Furthermore, there’s a certain level of machine-specific tribal knowledge that goes into each separate project.
PEKO’s engineers are highly trained in the science of machinery manufacturing and contain the engineering knowledge to understand and implement customer technology as deployed at the machine level.
Internally, our engineering team has the following knowledge and capabilities at their disposal:
PEKO has invested in dozens of in-house processes related to building industrial machinery and equipment. Our manufacturing processes are vertically integrated to bring metal parts to the assembly line while meeting (and oftentimes exceeding) your cost, quality, and delivery expectations.
Our huge facility boasts the following in-house manufacturing processes that support custom machine building initiatives:
Machinery manufacturing involves intense up-front engineering resources as soon as the project begins. In the engineering and development stage, the PEKO’s New Product Introduction (NPI) team will collaboratively engage with the customer and do a deep dive into the technology to help you tackle the normal engineering challenges of critical parameters, functionality, lifecycle testing, FMEA, mechanical analysis, and more. This is the stage where the technology and science of the custom machine will be verified and optimized. Even when customers come to us with a full design, our engineers will still go through this refinement process.
Our first priority in this process is to fully understand the customer’s needs, goals, and long-term objectives for functionality, cost, and delivery. Then, we will explore and determine the best approach to manufacturing your machinery, ensuring that all critical parameters are fully understood and controlled while simultaneously anticipating any pitfalls that the customers may face down the road.
Utilizing our specialized knowledge in DFMA, supply chain, and production, PEKO’s team of engineers can also help refine and optimize your equipment design for future volumes. Setting the standards for future production early is not only paramount to the design process but a differentiating factor when choosing PEKO for capital equipment manufacturing services.
While some customers come to us with a functional concept already manufactured, many need their custom machinery built from scratch. In either case, the prototype machine is ripe with challenges that only an experienced custom machine builder with comprehensive engineering support can handle. This phase of the process is especially critical.
Luckily, PEKO is a well-versed expert in building prototypes of custom, made-to-print machinery, and equipment. After you have gone through the engineering and development refinement process, PEKO then creates a prototype plan for your custom machine design with milestone goals in place that will move the project through the prototype and development phase into production.
Some other services we provide at this phase are:
When building custom machinery, it’s imperative that your contract manufacturing partner fully understands the importance of and the steps involved in the phase between prototyping and full-rate production: the pilot and pre-production phases. In this middle phase of the product introduction cycle, the custom machinery will need to be thoroughly documented.
Pilot builds are a perfect time in the capital equipment manufacturing process to ensure production readiness when all the functionality issues are complete. Customer machinery volumes at this phase are typically in the 5 to 15 quantity range. Some common tasks PEKO is performing at this phase in the process are:
The promised land for most equipment manufacturers is to have their machinery contract manufacturing partner shipping out units to meet demand quantities. In the case of the equipment built at PEKO, these volumes range from tens to hundreds of units per program on a yearly basis.
PEKO sets up custom manufacturing and assembly cells for each customer to ensure the builds are treated with the care and expertise they deserve. Technical aspects are taken into consideration and matched with the correct personnel within the company. Lean assembly principles are applied, and supply chain management is set in place.
Our goal as a custom machine builder is for the customer to treat us as the manufacturing leg of their business. The full-rate production phase of the equipment lifecycle contains any, if not all, of the following aspects:
PEKO engages in many high-tech industries to produce cutting-edge machinery and equipment of many types and sizes, such as automation equipment, electro-mechanical systems, high-end custom machinery, industrial process equipment, and custom medical equipment among others. Our experience in producing custom equipment has ingrained a mentality of constant evaluation of accuracy, process improvement, fault recognition, and most importantly safety.
Our services allow us to build machinery including (but not limited to) the following industry applications and equipment:
Capital equipment projects manufactured at PEKO with a full product lifecycle have unit prices of $10,000 to $500,000 and total orders often fall in the millions of dollars per year category over a range of 3 to 15 years, with some outliers in each direction.
Volumes are customer dependent based on machine type, market size, complexity, and more. PEKO typically services customers whose full-rate production volumes are expected to be in the tens to a few hundred per year range. Most custom machinery and capital equipment fit into this volume case simply by the nature of their market sizes. Contract manufacturing at these volumes is part of PEKO’s expertise because of the unique nature of the buy cycles and lead times.
The typical machine coming from PEKO ranges from $10,000 to $300,000. Pricing depends on a mixture of COTS, custom components, assembly time, testing time, and other factors. Our engineering proposal team will walk through the proposal process with your team to ensure pricing is fully understood and your proposal meets the expectations of a reputable machinery manufacturing company.
As a long-time, trusted custom machine builder, PEKO has the reputation, experience, facility, equipment, capabilities, and quality standards to satisfy your unique special machinery needs.
