A transfer is a risk decision, not a price decision. The measure of success is not the unit cost at the new supplier — it is whether your customers can tell that anything happened.
Every transfer starts with the same optimistic sentence: the documentation is complete. It never is. Not because anyone lied, but because a product that has been in production for years carries a layer of undocumented knowledge — the fixture someone modified, the torque that was quietly raised, the supplier substitution that was never released. The first job of a transfer is to find that layer before it finds you.
We open with a fit check and a gap analysis rather than a quotation. Volumes, complexity and standards are reviewed against what we actually do; then the documentation is compared to reality, item by item. Anything that lives only in the old supplier's heads is written down and back-documented into CAD and the bill of materials, so the new series starts from what works rather than from an old drawing.
The pilot batch is where the plan meets the process. It is built on the real line, with the real fixtures and the real work instructions — not hand-assembled by engineers to make the numbers look good. If a pilot needs three specialists and a workaround, the process is not ready, and shipping it anyway is how transfers acquire their reputation.
The last piece is the stock bridge. Old and new supply overlap on purpose, with the overlap quantity agreed before the first pilot unit is built. That single decision is what separates a boring transfer from an emergency, and it is the one buyers most often skip because it costs working capital in the same quarter it saves the relationship.
— GANI Contract Manufacturing engineering team