For many shops, bottlenecks in workflow can come in the fabrication stage and slow down an entire project. To alleviate the crunch, shops often outsource portions of a job they don’t have the capabilities to complete or that another company can do faster.
City Custom Cut aims to fill the outsourcing needs of sign shops.
The newly formed LLC is a sister business of the sign company City Neon, which Sign Builder Illustrated has covered in its pages before (“Educated Wayfinding,” March 2016, and “Serving Up Neon,” November 2015).
“This business is to help keep other companies lean by outsourcing segments of their operations that they find to be difficult because of cost, quality of equipment, or workforce production,” says Chris Atkins, vice president of City Neon. “We have each product broken down into specific stages to allow for customers to take over the completion of the products at whichever stage they are comfortable with.”
The company specializes in aluminum work, including sign cabinets, snap frames, wall frames, raceways, and cutting tubing and angle. The seed of the idea for the company actually came from City Neon’s interest in purchasing an elumatec® Saw.
City Neon realized that the exceptional efficiency of the saw would be better served in a separate processing facility that could handle lots of jobs.
Thanks to help from investors, the City Custom Cut processing facility was born about a quarter of a mile from City Neon. The new facility requires minimum employees as one person can run the saw as long as the instructions are followed. “That saw almost halves, if not cuts by 60 to 70 percent, our time on the cut versus using our miter saw,” says Atkins.
In fact, City Custom Cut is currently working on a project that requires the company to cut $30,000 worth of extrusion. “It’s a perfect job for the elumatec saw as we are reducing the cutting time from three weeks to three days,” says Nick Parsons, operations manager of City Custom Cut.
In addition to the elumatec saw, the facility includes a paint booth spraying Matthews Paint, and a wrapping machine that allows for easier packaging and the ability to keep a high volume of extrusions on the racks. There are also a number of mini forklifts, work benches, and open space to grow into.
City Custom Cut also offers an EZ Kit™, which provides the pieces and instructions to build a lighted cabinet. The kit comes in three different depths starting at four-by-eight and under, and it includes a mandatory list of materials and an optional list so that users can customize the cabinets. The EZ Kit will be distributed through N. Glantz & Son.
City Custom Cut’s goal is to build relationships and help customers succeed. “If you can improve production for somebody else, it’s only going to make that perception of your company better,” says Parsons, “and we feel that everyone will benefit.”
By Ashley Bray
All Photos: City Custom Cut
