Fathom is Your Product Lifecycle Partner
Our company is uniquely organized to meet your product lifecycle needs, from early concepts and prototypes to bridge and low-mid volume production.
The Ideal Fathom Engagement
Our specialty is the engineering and production of high-mix, low-medium volume parts. It’s a niche that takes a special blend of skills and expertise to serve effectively. It’s hard to replicate at scale. We offer a unique suite of on-demand services that can help you accelerate your time to market. Our teams have been doing it for decades, and we’re among the best in the industry.
We often help our customers iteratively develop and validate their part designs and move them efficiently into production. If your needs grow and you require hundreds of thousands or millions of parts, you’ll need to move up to a large contract manufacturer. That’s beyond our scope. But from prototyping and development through mid-volume production, we can provide exceptional value to you and your team.
What Makes Fathom Unique?
Many larger manufacturers won’t take on prototype work, because it doesn’t meet their criteria for part volume and revenue needs. They tend to avoid high-mix, low-volume parts. That’s because they have a large and costly infrastructure to support and can’t afford to devote precious manpower and resources to prototyping parts. They need long production runs to be profitable.
Others are marketplaces, connecting you with third-party manufacturers who tend to fragment your supply chain, not simplify it.
Fathom fills a unique niche. We’re problem solvers who design customized manufacturing solutions that are tailored to our customers’ biggest part design challenges. We offer a unique combination of manufacturing methods and services you can’t find under one roof anywhere else.
Consultative Approach
From the moment you contact us, you’ll be collaborating with an engineer who will work closely with you to fully understand your project needs. For example, we take a hands-on, personalized approach to ensure that all potential manufacturability problems are identified and mitigated early in the review process. We’ll help you identify the optimal manufacturing solution for your project through part design review, material selection recommendations, tolerance reviews, and more; all to provide the best solution at a competitive cost.
Exposure & Knowledge
Our broad portfolio of manufacturing technologies covers everything from CNC machining and metal forming to injection molding and the latest additive technologies. With over 25 manufacturing methods and 11 locations, we’re technology-agnostic. We’ll guide you to the solution that makes the most sense for your needs and the environment in which your parts must perform – including options you may not have considered, like creating STEP parts or urethane castings to help finalize a part design before having tooling made for injection molding, or even producing prototype parts using DMLS out of the same metal the customer will be using for casting during production; this gives them prototype parts that have similar physical characteristics so they can test for fit, finish and functionality.
Quality / DFM
We take a hands-on, personalized approach to ensure that potential manufacturability problems are identified and mitigated early in the review process. We’ll help you identify the optimal manufacturing solution for your project through part design review, material selection recommendations, tolerance reviews, and more – all to provide the best solution at a competitive cost.
How Do We Add Value?
Here’s what your experience with Fathom will look like at each step of your product lifecycle:
Early Concept
- Comprehensive Design for Manufacturability (DFM) Analysis
- Part design optimization
- Identify opportunities for cost reduction in part design, tooling and the proposed production process.
- Consolidate assemblies into single parts, where possible
Rapid Prototyping
- Quickly iterate product design using on-demand manufacturing methods (no tooling) until a final design is agreed upon.
- The customer uses these parts to validate fit, finish and functionality.
Bridge Production
- Build a limited number of parts (10s to low 1000s) to help the customer do an early soft launch or get feedback from key customers.
- In some cases, we may supply parts built using on-demand methods until the customer’s tooling is ready.
Short-Run Production
- Production parts, made in quantities large enough for the customer to do a product launch and handle the early stages of product sales (low 1000s to 10,000s).
Full Production
- 10,000 parts or more, produced on an ongoing basis to meet big production needs.
Talk to an Expert
Fathom has the expertise and technology to help you accelerate your time to market. Whether you’re in the early stages of new product development or need a partner that can help you with your production needs, we can help you. Talk to a Fathom expert today!
