Optic Fabrication: Do You Make Or Do You Buy?

It’s not enough for industrial manufacturers to simply deliver great products anymore. Every organization today is exploring a better approach to shorten their development cycle to remain ahead of competitors. Despite the natural inclination for manufacturers to keep as many product development steps as possible in house, this can be short-sighted when fabricating optical devices. Before making a decision, it’s important to analyze whether making or buying optical parts and components is the best approach for your team, budget, and business goals.  

Considerations When Making Optics
Even though in-house optics fabrication and assembly may provide more control over a product development process, it can be extremely costly and time consuming.  As a small industry, it can be challenging to locate the necessary personnel with the requisite amount of experience. Typically it will take months to purchase all the equipment necessary, but years to build up the know-how to master it. So unless your predicted volume is high, the reduced cost of internally produced optics will not cover the fixed costs of implementation.