• We offer cost savings in your final product, from suggesting alternate materials that improve your product while reducing costs, to offering variations of production processes to assure optimum productivity of your product while reducing your cost. We offer quality levels that are the best in the industry that reduce your defective PPM levels, increase your productivity, reduce your inspection time, improve your product quality, and reduce your returns and warranty expense. In other words, we reduce your cost to manufacture and sell product.
• We provide control of the products we deliver to you from start to finish. We control the process, from the receipt of the raw materials, the development of the grades, the sheet making process, the production process, the designing and building of the tool, the final fabrication, quality assurance, and inventory. This assures you of a single-source supplier with controls from start to finish. We have the ability to identify and resolve issues, and capitalize on opportunities in the shortest possible time while providing you the lowest cost solution. Offering one-stop responsibility eliminates the problem of blaming the supplier for unresolved issues and removes the extra expense needed to cover additional margins and freight. This reduces your cost to produce your product.
• Iten is ISO 9001 certified, so you can trust us to understand and achieve your expectations, the first time, every time. This will reduce your cost of misunderstandings and broken promises. With an accurate understanding of your expectations, we will not increase your costs because of added expenses and supplying you with more than you are expecting. Our goal is to achieve your expectations 100% of the time, with the most cost- effective products and services Iten can supply.
• Iten achieves your expectations with an excellent group of people.They are the best in the industry and are dedicated to assuring that everyone involved knows what must be done to keep you happy and make your job easier. If we don’t know the answer, we will find it and get back to you. Iten's staff has been provided with a state of the art ERP system that coordinates your purchase orders and forecasts to our manufacturing floor. This establishes capacity requirements so that adjustments can be made to maximize our effectiveness, which reduces your costs. We want to communicate with you on a regular basis to understand your production needs. With this close communication our production can be scheduled to have parts in inventory, ready to ship, when you need them. The better we can plan and understand your delivery requirements, the lower your costs will be.
• Iten’s objective is to be the lowest cost producer of your products. We are not a discount house where cheap price is accomplished by giving you what you already have. Rather, we give you what you need at the best value possible. This is not accomplished by cutting corners on quality, which would result in costs after the purchase because the product didn’t achieve your expectations.

COST SAVING SOLUTIONS:

• The original objective was to improve on the metal spring by reducing the height, eliminating the noise, reducing assembly time, and increase the cyclic life of the spring from fatigue failure at 80,000 cycles to 200,000 cycles. Our imagineered solution was a pultruded spring member that we made in continuous strips, which was automatically fed into a molding machine and cut to length during the cycle. The insert is over molded with polypropylene to create the connections necessary to fasten the finished spring to the bed frame and the wire top grid of the foundation. We accomplished all of the objectives in about one year and made a cost effective spring that exceeded 1,000,000 cycles, retaining 90% of its initial spring constant. This project included prototype engineering and developmental work with sample tooling. All of this was done by Iten working with the customer to assure successful accomplishment of the goals.
• For one of our electrical switchgear customers we created a family of machined panels from an electrical insulating pultrusion used as the backbone of very large automatic high voltage switches. The panels provide strengths that could not be obtained with molded parts, except at much greater weight, size, part cost, and about 10 times the tool cost. These large (up to 15”x 48”) pultrusions are machined to different configurations and fitted with hardware to provide connecting strengths that would have been difficult and costly to accomplish with a molded part. Switches have been tested to explosive failure and the panel retains its integrity. All aspects of this part creation we accomplished in house by Iten.
• In earlier days, sonar systems in submarines were produced using Bellville metal washers stacked together. This caused static, and during ascents and descents the sonar was unable to function well enough to identify objects. The solution was to create a spring out of many thin glass epoxy washers bonded together. These were then tested for amplitude and magnitude and tuned with different tuning washers to match the output of the transducer to the requirements. As you might guess, this was an expensive, time consuming process that yielded nothing but varied results. Iten was asked to supply the glass epoxy washers and when we understood the customer’s objective, we developed a special process to manufacture a solid 4½” sheet of material that allowed us to produce a "sonic spring" that met the requirements of aptitude and magnitude transition. This was done by controlling the mass of the part. With the OD and length of the part a constant, we determined how much to vary the ID of the part to adjust for density variation in a sheet, from the edges, corners, and center to assure every part was in spec. We produced over 200,000 parts over a five (5) year time period and never had an issue. The parts were to have a life cycle of seven (7) years and to our knowledge, not one has been replaced.
• As a supplier to a capacitor manufacturer, we were asked to help them save money by replacing their steel cans and caps with a 100% plastic case. The problem they were trying to resolve was how to create the same failsafe function in a plastic case that keeps the steel cans from blowing up at failure. Iten’s solution was a double hinged "pop top". This allowed the plastic cap that was sonically welded to the can to flex and extend approximately ¼ inch, breaking the internal circuit before enough pressure could build to explode the capacitor.
• Thinking outside the box, Iten saved two customers money by combining their requirements. Both customers used the same material. One customer used a large volume of material and relatively large parts in seven different sizes and the other customer used a smaller volume of material and a very large volume of parts. To accommodate both, we developed combination tooling that produced both parts at the same time. The customer using the large volume of material bought the material, and the other customer paid for the fabrication. Both customers saved money and Iten kept them both happy with great quality and delivery.
• High-pressure laminates have been around for many years and manufactured to relatively the same physical and electrical specifications. One of our customers had been using our standard product in a speaker application, and also used a special wood product in another application. Although the wood product was perfect because of its specific gravity, the sound generation created processing problems that they wanted to resolve. To satisfy this opportunity, Iten developed special processing which allowed us to duplicate the specific gravity of the wood application and eliminate the customer’s processing problems.
• One of our electrical switchgear customers purchased large, close-tolerance, machined parts that were assembled by them to hold large copper contacts securely in place. These were quite expensive and the assembly process was involved and time consuming. The alternate design Iten developed was an 80% cost saving on the purchased price alone. These two plates took the tolerance problems out of the assembly by machining the tolerances into single plates of material. It also reduced the assembly time.
  The savings presented to the customer was $420,000 a year.