Best Practices for finding manufacturing support.

[Madison]

I'd like to find a local shop that wants to join our team as a sponsor and provide manufacturing support during the build season. I want to do more work teaching students about design and less supervision of things like drilling holes and cutting stock to length, but I believe that'll require moving a lot of our production out of house since the availability of the experienced mentors on my time is, unfortunately, a finite resource.

We've had little trouble raising the money we need to compete effectively, but we haven't had any success in tempting a manufacturing sponsor to join us and offer in-kind services.

I'd love some advice or anecdotes about what some of y'all have done to get this sort of sponsor on board. What is the carrot that you dangle before them to get their support?

Can anyone offer a ballpark idea for the value of the contributions by sponsors like this? I'd love to find someone who'll provide sponsorship akin to that provided by IFI, for example, but I have NO idea what sort of financial burden that really is for the sponsor.

[Ben Martin]

We have had two such sponsors provide such services -- Mike Trapp of Waterjet Cutting of Indiana and Cassini Manufacturing. Mike Trapp is located in Indianapolis, and he provides waterjet cutting services to many local teams there on weekends. Cassini is a local resource for our team, and they provide cutting services for ourselves and team 1646. We provide the materials.

The Waterjet Cutting of Indiana connection was established through college mentors who used those waterjet resources in high school. The Cassini connection was established through 1646.

Each sponsor gets referenced in our sponsor lists and their logos are put on the robot. Whenever we cut parts, we also take students to the facilities to see their manufacturing processes.

[James Tonthat]

What we've done is bring by a couple pictures of what you've made in the past, what you're about, FIRST is about, etc. For us, we brought along pictures of 148's robots since we were going to sheetmetal and showed them what kind of parts to expect. Make sure they understand that there's a team of 20 or so students on the team and not just 3 people wanting to make a robot. Tell them about what kind of delivery dates you expect, how much cutting it takes/their time. We found that a lot of them are reluctant to commit verbally because they usually don't know what they're getting their selves into but once they go through a season and see what kind of parts and quantities you need they're usually a lot more willing to help.

I found that bribes help a lot. Each season, I buy a case of Crown Royal for our shop manager and for the employees. (Can I say that here?)

The value of our parts when we began last year was about $1k of parts. This year we built two robots and the value of the service was $3k-4k. Offer to pay for the material, to try and help their costs. We also emphasized that we'll try to save their time as much as possible by doing drawings a certain way, or reducing parts count, giving lead time, etc.

We're very lucky to have the sponsors we do, they're willing to put our stuff at the front of the queue at times when we really need them. That stuff you can't put a price on (well, you can but it'd be a lot), but we started pushing the envelope on time after we got them more locked in.

Sorry if I'm all over the place or not detailed enough (trying to make a quick reply as I study for finals), let me know if you need any more help or suggestions.