Custom Fittings, Assemblies, Kitting and Your Bottom Line

Last updated on August 12, 2025

Custom fittings, small production run tubing assemblies, medical sub-assemblies, bagging, and clean room repackaging all play important roles in process budgeting, planning, and design. However, they take time away from other essential functions. Luckily, many manufacturers, distributors, and value-added contract manufacturers offer these services, freeing you up to focus on other things.

In this post, we’ll explore the importance of services like customized fittings,tubing assemblies and sub-assemblies,including medical sub-assemblies, and cleanroom repackaging with an emphasis on small production runs.

Custom Flow Control Fittings

What happens when your flow project requires a specific component, but you just can’t seem to find it anywhere? It’s easy to say you want an integrated check valve or orifice with the appropriate fittings, but harder to actually find someone delivering on what you need. Unless, that someone is willing to source and combine the right components, making custom fittings with short turnarounds tailored to your needs.

Examples of Custom Fittings:

• Integrated check valves or relief valves
• Internal orifices
• Modified fittings/connectors
• Adding filters to flow control components

The ISM Advantage

Offering fitting customization as a reliable service takes specialized experience, flexibility, and an emphasis on quality. It becomes even more challenging when the requirement is for a small production run. Value-added manufacturers like ISM take the time to understand your use case and unique needs. We also specialize in small production runs, including those with limited timeframes, allowing us to address your needs quickly, flexibly, and economically.

 

Cut-to-Length Plastic Tubing

It’s difficult to determine the right diameter, durometer, and length needs for your tubing. Imagine having a supply chain partner who can not only answer those questions but offer cut-to-length plastic tubing of the correct size and material, saving you time as well as headache. Cut to length tubing services take advantage of specialized machinery that you’d otherwise have to invest in yourself.

The ISM Advantage

The ISM production department has a high-speed automated tubing cutter. This countertop cutter is able to cut up to 100 feet of tubing per minute. Even with very short lengths of tubing that require more frequent cuts, the machine still cuts an average of 65 feet per minute. This is really useful for us because ISM makes thousands of tubing assemblies for our customers every month.

This tubing cutter is precise and makes perfect square cuts with no pinching. It can cut tubing ranging from 0.08” OD (outer diameter) to 1” OD. Custom tubing lengths can be as short as about 1/4" (7.32mm) or as long as about 80 feet (25m). All within a +/-0.055 inch (1.4mm) tolerance or 0.5% for longer lengths.   Our tubing cutter can handle a wide variety of plastic and elastomer tubing:

• Latex
• Tygon
• Hosing
• Silicone
• Vinyl Tubing
• Flexible PVC
• Nylon Tubing
• Polyethylene
• Rubber Hose
• Polypropylene
• Medical Tubing
• Flexible Polyurethane

 

Plastic Tubing Assemblies

Now imagine you don’t just have the right tubing cut-to-length, but you also get that tubing pre-fitted with fittings, valves, and in-line filters according to your needs. This is particularly handy when you need multiple of the same type of tubing assembly and don’t have the personnel power for the job.

Because sterilization is not an issue for industrial applications, custom assemblies outside of a clean room are widely offered as a service to industrial and OEM manufacturers. Many of the quality issues still apply though, so having an experienced and reliable partner that emphasizes both efficiency and quality makes all the difference.

The ISM Advantage

ISM combines decades of flow control expertise with the flexibility to handle small or large runs, all while maintaining ISO-certified quality standards. Our team works to your specifications, integrates the right fittings, valves, and filters, and delivers assemblies that help you save time, reduce labor costs, and simplify your supply chain. We also test our components and assemblies to your requirements, ensuring reliable quality in every assembly.

 

Medical Sub-Assemblies and Repackaging

Medical part manufacturers produce and ship small parts in quantities much too large for easy handling for production purposes. This makes repackaging parts into more practical quantities a highly useful service. What’s more, these packaging services can combine consumable medical devices such as check valves and syringe filters with medical grade tubing to make tubing sub-assemblies or kits for tubing sets. This essentially makes medical-grade sub-assemblies and repackaging part of a combined service that saves time and money, especially for smaller production runs.

All of that said, medical sub-assemblies and repackaging of components come with their own unique challenges. For production runs of medical sub-assemblies, the emphasis has to be on overall quality. A complete medical assembly or tubing set requires highly specialized packaging and sterilization. Because these are medical parts, repackaging should take place in a certified cleanroom environment to minimize particle contamination. Much of this expertise applies to the final stages of production.

The ISM Advantage

There are considerable costs and complexity savings, especially for small production runs, when having a contract service put together medical sub-assemblies to speed up and simplify production. These require clean room assembly but, because final packaging and sterilization come later, it significantly reduces the overhead of keeping everything in house. ISM (dba IS Med Specialties when working with medical applications) has an ISO Class 8 Certified Clean Room alongside the necessary in-house expertise.
With ISM, you get:

• Predictable quality
• Improvement in production cycle times
• Simpler and cheaper part inventory management
• Availability of the correct ratio of parts for production processes
• Timely provision of part quantities for flexible production planning

Custom Kitting and Bagging

“Kitting” can describe everything from medical sub-assemblies and plastic tubing assemblies to the repackaging of both medical and industrial parts. Generally, though, kitting implies the creation of a mix of parts either loosely bagged or as a sub-assembly.
Custom bagging is an associated service due to its added flexibility and benefits:

• Simplified quality control
• Easily adaptable to market changes
• Full customization is possible including custom labeling
• No infrastructure, training and space commitments for specialized machinery
• Small production runs prevent large runs of incorrectly chosen quantities and combinations

Put simply, they help you balance professionalism with flexibility by securely sealing and labeling small production runs of component combinations, including custom fittings and assemblies.

The ISM Advantage

Our equipment includes semi- to fully automated bagging and sealing machines that complement small and short production runs, as well as build-on-demand services. They also add support for medium-to-large volume production runs.

 

Finding a Value-Added Service Provider

Outsourcing value-added services save you time and money while providing the best possible fit. More specifically, they help you:

• Avoid production bottlenecks
• Maintain focus on core business
• Respond more quickly and nimbly to market changes
• An economic option when volume is too low for automation
• Reduce inventory costs with just-in-time supply of parts or sub-assemblies

But it matters who you choose for your value-added services as well, especially in cases where you might be needing higher quality, smaller runs, or a combination of the two without breaking the bank.

• Quality outcomes are predictable
• Prevent resources from being tied up in small projects
• Short-term commitments are inherently practical and flexible
• Solve immediate, urgent problems without process re-design
• Leverage the expertise of suppliers to prevent waste and develop design solutions

Therefore, what to look for in a value-added service provider generally revolves around quality, reliability and efficiency. You want to work with an organization with inherently flexible processes that allow for custom modifications, is comfortable handling a wide range of variations for a wide range of challenges and use cases, and places an emphasis on accuracy, including performing their own testing. In other words, you want to work with ISM.

 

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