January 16, 2025

Checking the Boxes on Your Approved Vendor List

By Protolabs

To make it as painless as possible to add Protolabs to your company’s approved vendor list—and streamline part ordering as a result—we pulled together some of the most important areas that procurement and supply chain teams often look for when sourcing a manufacturing supplier.

Here are 11 reasons why Protolabs is a good fit.

1. Competitive Pricing

Competitive and accurate pricing is available with your quote in a matter of minutes. Production pricing is also available for injection molding, CNC machining, and additive manufacturing. Plus, our applications engineers are always available to discuss key cost trade-offs for designs. 

2. Quality Assurance

Unlike quality measures of traditional manufacturing systems—usually conducted at the end of the production chain—quality assurance is embedded throughout our entire process. Project traceability and transparency are found every step along the way.

Injection Molding. Process development reports and basic inspection reports are included with each order, and enhanced inspection reports such as FAIs are available upon request. We offer ISO 13485 injection molding capabilities through trusted partners.
Learn more about quality for injection molding here

CNC Machining. All machined parts are inspected for cosmetic conformance to workmanship standards and dimensional conformance on at least three dimensions (typically X, Y, and Z). With production parts for machining, we also provide conventional inspection reporting like FAI, Certificate of Compliance (CoC) documentation, and additional certifications such as ISO 9001 and AS9100.

3D Printing/Additive Manufacturing. To ensure high-quality parts, we offer powder analysis, material traceability, process validation, and inspection reporting on printed parts, and our metal 3D printing process is ISO 9001 and AS9100D-certified. With metal 3D printing, you’re also able to choose from several secondary processes like post-process machining, tapping, reaming, and heat treatments that produce end-use production parts.

Sheet Metal Fabrication. Sheet metal fabrication happens in our New Hampshire facility and is ISO 9001:2015 certified. As a part of our standard inspection process, all sheet metal fabricated parts are inspected visually and dimensionally. Inspections provide design verification for sheet metal parts and a standard internal inspection process for all manufactured parts. Additional services are available upon request, including: FAI, CoC, as well as material and finish certifications. We offer welding, hardware insertion, plating, silk screening, and powder coating to provide complete sheet metal components all under one roof.

Learn more about quality assurance for sheet metal. 

3. Quoting and Manufacturing Speed

We provide interactive quotes with free design analysis within a few hours and have expedite options across all four of our manufacturing service lines, so we can ship parts in as fast as day.

4. Production Scheduling

We have programmed automated algorithms to help prioritize and streamline ordering and scheduling processes. This helps accelerate the manufacturing process—a key element in the digital equation that allows us to ship parts in as fast as 24 hours.

5. Capacity

More than 1,000 pieces of automated manufacturing equipment run at 80% capacity to avoid production delays. This means you’re always at the front of the line, so we are a reliable option if you run into a supply chain emergency or line-down situation.


6. Equipment

We’re technology agnostic with many different equipment providers, so we're not reliant on one OEM. When we add new machines to our manufacturing floors, they are typically customized for speed and accuracy, just like our existing equipment.

7. Security

All proprietary 3D CAD files, intellectual property, or customer information is protected. And server redundancies are in place, so data is protected and backed up. We are also ITAR compliant, and because we are a global company, we ensure that employees outside of the U.S. don’t have access to any parts or part information for ITAR-classified projects. This means keeping separate databases for different countries, having procedures in place to ensure that any parts or information we share publicly or between locations aren’t ITAR controlled, and not allowing employees from other locations access to the manufacturing floor or other secured areas. We also prohibit photo, video, and audio recording from visitors in our offices and manufacturing facilities.

8. Safety

Multiple measures are in place to ensure a safe work environment on the production floor including sound dampening, robotic block handlers, and safety harness systems. For example, at our CNC machining facility, we installed Gorbel Tether Track fall protection—an engineered track-and-trolley system—over each milling machine. The system uses a self-retracting lifeline and a personal fall arrest harness to protect our employees as they work atop mills. It immediately locks and stops like a seatbelt if it senses a fall.

9. Material Inventory

You can choose from more than 100 different thermoplastic and elastomer materials for injection molding and more than 40 plastic and metal materials for CNC machining. With 3D printing, we have 30+ plastic resins and metal powders for both prototype- and production-grade, end-use parts. Also, we offer a selection of the most commonly requested sheet metal options including galvanized and galvannealed steel. e also accept customer-supplied materials for molded parts. The bottom line is that we have a variety of materials that can meet nearly any project requirement.

Explore our extensive material options. 


10. Extensive Manufacturing Experience

We have experienced engineering, quality, and procurement teams, and our highly skilled machine and press operators oversee pre-production, production, and post-production activities. With additive manufacturing, for example, we’ve seen more than 1 million 3D-printed part geometries during the past 20 years. If you have any manufacturing or procurement questions, you can talk with an in-house applications engineer at any time.

11. Single Supplier

All parts manufactured in our factories or network partner facilities aim for consistency, speed, and reliability. But we also serve as your single contact for quality control and finishing options in-house—or with a trusted third-party vendor—to ensure you are getting end-use parts as fast as possible.