A client needed equipment to recycle a particular product. Within the budget, there was no obvious purpose-built machine we could simply recommend. We found a machine that looked promising, but the next step had to be a practical test.
The material was in Europe and the equipment was in China. The immediate answer was to ship a sample across. Once we looked at the shipping cost, we asked whether we actually needed that particular sample to make the assessment.
What mattered was having material with the same relevant specifications. We found a Chinese manufacturer able to supply it locally, at a fraction of the cost of sending the client’s material from Europe. That let us move ahead with testing in China without the expensive sample shipment.