By Mark Shortt
If you’re a data center equipment designer or manufacturer, the recent surge in data center construction within the U.S. may seem a bit like the California gold rush of the mid-19th century: lots of frenzied activity across a frontier where quick decision-making and fast actions rule.
With U.S.-manufactured server racks, power distribution units (PDUs), electrical busbars, and cooling systems in high demand, you’re more than likely prioritizing short lead times and fast production—without compromising quality—of components and assemblies to keep up with that demand.
“While price is always a factor, our customers are looking for short lead times and high-quality parts,” said Jamie Benter, director of business development for Richfield, Wisconsin-based Dielectric Manufacturing Group, a manufacturer of electrical busbars and other components, in an emailed response to Design-2-Part. “Our customers keep coming back because we are very responsive to their needs.”
Integrated manufacturing services
One way to achieve shorter lead times and quicker delivery is to work with a vertically integrated contract manufacturing partner that has all the manufacturing services you need under their umbrella—whether in a single facility, or spread out across multiple sites in different geographical areas. By integrating their capabilities in this way, the contract manufacturer can serve its customers as a one-stop shop, saving them the time and money required to shepherd their project through multiple suppliers.
“Because we are integrated across the DMG organization, we serve as a one-stop shop for all the parts they (data center OEM customers) need, including busbars,” Benter said. Dielectric Manufacturing Group is a single-source supplier of precision plastic and metal parts that provides machining, fabrication, and custom busbar systems. “It allows us to produce and deliver parts quickly, and they only have to work with one provider.”
“Our capabilities are broad, and when we talk to our customers, they tell us that’s one of our best value propositions, if not the best,” said TPC Group President Luis Gomez, in an interview with Design-2-Part. “We’re able to provide support to our customers as a one-stop shop, not just from a capability perspective, but also from a geography perspective.”
Early collaboration with your partner’s engineers
An equally valuable practice is to begin collaborating with your contract manufacturer’s engineers early in the design stage, before costly design errors make their way into production. By taking initiative in this way, you can help ensure improvements to product manufacturability, quality, turnaround time, and overall cost, according to Benter.
“In order to achieve the most cost-effective and manufacturable busbar system, it’s critical to ensure early involvement with us,” Benter said. “We have a team of experts who can make recommendations on items such as material, dimensions, plating and coating.”
Quality certifications not required, but still relevant
There’s no doubt the data center industry shares certain similarities with other industries that demand complex, high-performance components manufactured to high quality standards. Unlike the aerospace and defense, medical, and automotive industries, however, it lacks an industry-specific quality management system certification for its suppliers.
But this shouldn’t deter companies from finding suppliers capable of providing precision components, assemblies, and systems that attain the levels of quality and reliability needed for data center equipment. Mike Moss, sales director at Anaheim, California-based sheet metal fabricator Continental Industries, confirmed that contract manufacturers don’t need a specific certification to serve data center customers.
“As long as we can make the parts per print and be accurate and on time—that’s what they (data center customers) need,” Moss told Design-2-Part in an interview. “The data centers themselves have to comply with UL regulations.”
If a contract manufacturer is certified to a quality management system standard such as ISO 9001, ISO 13485 (medical), AS9100D (aerospace), or IATF 16949 (automotive), you can reasonably assume that it will apply the same rigorous quality standards to its data center projects as it does for aerospace, medical, or automotive work. Their ability to satisfy the challenging requirements of those industries is a strength that travels well to data centers.
“Our ability to meet aerospace, defense, and medical requirements, all of which are very strict, helps us in the data center because the requirements [there] are less strict for obvious reasons,” said TPC’s Gomez. “Although the data center space is not as stringent, we serve our data center customers the same way we serve our defense customers, our aerospace customers. We don’t change our processes because of the different parts or markets they’re going into.”
Can your supplier expand its capacity?
If you’re an OEM or designer of data center equipment, you know that surging demand for data storage racks, cabinets, aisle containment products, chiller units, and other AI infrastructure has moved data center OEMs to impose shorter lead times for such equipment. At the same time, it has caused many contract manufacturers to expand their production capacity for these units, some of which are quite large in size and very complex.
“From a partnership perspective, it’s all about capacity,” Gomez explained. “There’s so much demand, at this moment and in the foreseeable future, that they (data center customers) want to make sure that their supplier has the capacity required to flex with them because it requires a ramp-up.”
A contract manufacturer’s capacity to meet the production requirements of OEMs hinges on multiple factors, including whether enough floor space and manufacturing equipment are available to accommodate a ramp-up. But it also requires the contract manufacturer to have sufficient financial backing to buy whatever amounts of machinery, equipment, and materials are needed to execute the projects.
“It’s always been the case that they (data center customers) want to make sure that they’re working with a reputable company that has enough financial backing to buy enough material ahead of time, because of capacity,” Gomez said. “We’re talking about millions of dollars’ worth of purchasing that we have to do ahead of time.”
For more on contract manufacturing for data centers, see How Contract Manufacturers Are Helping Data Centers Meet An Exponential Rise In Demand.