Many manufacturers consider the selection of materials as a procurement issue. They think it should be resolved at the beginning of the project and revisited only when costs increase or a supplier is lost. However, this approach is a mistake. The materials chosen during the design phase define the assembly process, the life of the product, compliance with regulations, and in the end, your profit margins.
How materials dictate your manufacturing method
The choice of material doesn’t just describe what you’re building. It determines how you build it.
Specify a composite panel and you’ve already ruled out conventional welding. Choose two dissimilar metals without accounting for galvanic corrosion risk and you’ve built a failure point into the product before a single unit ships. These aren’t edge cases – they’re the kind of downstream consequences that surface as rework costs, warranty claims, or production bottlenecks months after the design decision was made.
“Best-in-Class” manufacturers are 2.2x more likely than laggards to integrate material selection early in the design phase to reduce total lifecycle costs (Aberdeen Group). That gap doesn’t come from spending more. It comes from treating material choice as a design variable rather than a line item.
The case for moving away from mechanical fasteners
Using traditional assembly methods to solve a joining problem might create new issues. For instance, every hole drilled to accommodate a rivet or bolt becomes a stress concentration point. In turn, every fastening component dramatically increases the weight of the entire structure. And for fatigue-prone applications, these stress points will likely function as the weak link, where failure will initiate following numerous loading cycles.
Chemical bonding however, redistributes the geometry of the issue in a bid to optimize it. For example, a properly selected industrial structural adhesive is designed to spread the load over the entirety of the bond area, rather than localize it to particular spots as is the case with rivets, bolts, and screws. For this reason, the performance demands on the substrate itself are greatly reduced and the substrate can often be thinner and lighter. In specific applications, the substrate can only be assembled with bonding because it would be destroyed cutting holes in it. This can happen when bonding composites or assembling with some plastics.
Additionally, from a substrate perspective especially, the adhesive must deliver the needed thermal expansion performance, vibration characteristics, and environmental resistance. If the adhesive is poorly matched to the substrate, thereby possibly causing the bond to be the weak point, you have not solved a joining problem – you have just obfuscated it.
Lightweighting as a margin strategy
Lightweighting is often seen as an engineering objective. It is also a business imperative.
Lower assembly weight equals lower shipping costs, multiplied by every unit in a production run. In certain industries, lighter assembly at the end-user level equals lower energy consumption, and that increasingly is a marketable advantage. High-performance materials that maintain structural integrity at lower thicknesses also do not compromise strength for weight. They improve it.
All of this is contingent on designing the material and the method of joining together. A lighter panel bonded with a resin incapable of handling thermal expansion differentials between dissimilar substrates isn’t a lightweighting win. It’s a future lawsuit.
The hidden cost of getting it wrong
Wasting and reworking products are two of the main culprits when it comes to manufacturing profit loss. And inconsistent material quality is often to blame. When the materials you source fail to meet your specifications (be it tensile strength, dimensional tolerance, or surface finish), your production will suffer. Slow down, waste increase, and so does the likelihood of your actual bill of materials aligning with your costed BOM.
Meanwhile, your supply chain’s ability to bounce back plays a big part here too. If your suppliers can’t guarantee the same quality or reliably provide the materials you need, you’re automatically introducing more variability than your process can handle. ISO 9001 compliance states that your materials must be traceable so that you can quickly pinpoint the origin of substandard quality and/or performance – not just for the sake of satisfying documentation requirements.
Finally, the real cost of your materials isn’t simply what you pay for them. Cheaper materials that wear out faster or lead to higher scrap and rework rates add costs elsewhere in the production process. Likewise, if the finished product lifespan is reduced due to the inadequate quality of the materials, replenishment and disposal costs will also escalate. And none of these costs are typically factored into the build-versus-buy decision.
Regulatory compliance belongs in the design phase
Many companies treat REACH and RoHS restrictions as a legal review step before product launch. If at that point, you find a non-compliant material specification, you have to redesign – and that’s sunk cost in tooling, prototyping, and supplier qualification.
Instead, if compliance is an input specification that guides your material choice at the R&D stage, that risk goes away. With a compliant source and a compliant product, your sales and support team can send the same materials and data sheet to any country you sell in. Voices in your company that worry you’ll lose access to markets are quieted. There’s no revenue stream stemming from more excluded markets.
Material decisions compound over time
The choice of material drives the product’s cost and functionality, component uptime and reliability, manufacturing ease, speed to market, manufacturability, maintenance, recyclability, and even customer satisfaction and revenue. It’s the lever the smart manufacturers use as the starting point of their strategic sourcing process.
