Spare capacity feels like free money until job-work chaos eats the captive schedule. The goal is deliberate fill, not every RFQ that fits through the gate. Plants that sell “open hours” without rules usually discover they have sold their planning system.
Start by defining the offer narrowly. Write down the alloys and size envelope you run well, the minimum run length and lead time you will accept, whether finishing is in or out of scope, and who brings dies versus who pays for new tooling. “We do job work” is not a go-to-market. A clear envelope is.
Then be choosy about who you sell it to. Fabricators with spiky demand, OEMs overflowing a primary supplier, and peer plants needing overflow can all be healthy. Traders can work with strict credit and price rules. What you want to avoid is becoming the emergency room for everyone else’s poor planning unless the premium truly pays for the disruption — including the changeovers you pretend are free.
Protect the captive book in writing. Reserve capacity blocks instead of selling one hundred percent of theoretical hours. Price urgent slots and messy changeovers explicitly. Give contracted accounts calendar priority so job-work does not always win the slot argument by being louder. If overflow always bumps the core book, you do not have a strategy — you have anxiety.
Commercially, treat job-work with the same hygiene as everything else: floors, credit limits, die ownership, and a weekly pipeline. It should live in the same operating cadence as OEM and channel sales, not in a side notebook owned by whoever answered the phone.
Positioning matters more than people admit. Sell reliability and fit — this envelope, these lead times — not desperation that the press is free on Tuesday. Buyers smell idle capacity and negotiate accordingly.
Filling presses is classic industrial BD and GTM design. Vulcan helps plants set the offer, the target list, and the rules so spare hours fund the business instead of fragmenting it.