Purchasing injection-molded components is a major undertaking. And choosing an injection molding supplier can be nerve-racking. Suppliers have different processes, protocols, and communication styles.
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What are you looking for in a plastic injection molding partner? What are your expectations for quality, timing of delivery, technology, production capabilities, financial health, and a continuation plan?
All of these are considerations when looking to deliver a project on time and within your budget.
Some partners, such as Crescent Industries, have evolved the capacity to offer post-processing operations to help manage the complete supply chain. This full-service approach can provide design, mold build, molding, secondary operations, and inventory management to help ensure on-time and on-budget delivery.
Choosing a supplier is not simply a matter of choosing the lowest number from a series of estimates. It&#;s important to dig down into the core competencies of the potential partner and understand if they can handle a project from cradle to grave and beyond.
One of the biggest issues in the injection molding industry &#; for molders and customers alike &#; is evaluating the total cost of ownership throughout the lifetime of a project. That means understanding the difference between being price conscious and cost conscious.
It&#;s important to understand your needs and to plan for the future. For example, one OEM chose a supplier for an initial prototyping and short-run production. But once the production demand increased, the supplier could not support the required high-volume production due to capacity and resource restraints. They had to move the tools to a supplier who could handle these high-volume orders. On the other end of the spectrum, another customer incurred steep setup fees without understanding that they had chosen a supplier that only did high-volume production.
You are not just choosing a supplier; you are choosing a manufacturing partner.
In cases where budget and delivery problems occurred in a plastic injection molding project, it&#;s often true that these problems could have been prevented during the partner selection process. These problems include:
- Compromised quality
- Unpredictable lead and delivery times
- Gaps in capability
There are a number of qualities that plastic injection molding manufacturers can demonstrate to show that they are best qualified to avoid these problems.
Quality
Customers seeking a plastic injection molding partner can ask for a number of assurances about the quality of the work. Injection molding providers can prove their ability to meet quality standards by showing potential customers that they have:
- Adequate traceability from resin raw material to the finished product
- Quality certifications and protocols that are needed for your industry segment
- The ability to track scrap to achieve a quality KPI
- A robust molding process that is approved during the mold-building process
- An excellent quality inspection lab (team)
- Industry 4.0 technology that monitors the injection molding process on all machines live on the production floor
- Demonstrated success in the market
Timeliness
A qualified partner should have a process for communicating timelines that involves an initial agreement between customer and manufacturer about timelines and expectations. Procurement challenges do occur, but advance planning reduces these challenges. In plastics, procurement of raw materials (resins and compounds) can take 6 to 16 weeks or more, depending on disruptions in the supply chain like weather-related disasters and global events.
Injection molders also meet expectations of timeliness through transparency in their forecast of the entire process and through supply chain management practices. Some specific ways they achieve on-time delivery include:
- Providing mold design, fabrication, qualification, and production in-house: Providing these services in-house cuts down dramatically on the time that would be required to have the project transported and processed elsewhere.
- Using Kanban (just-in-time) shipping technology to track and maintain inventory levels.
- Using Focused Factory work cells: Studies have shown that the physical time of manufacturing the product is only 5-12% of the total lead time in a project. Using the Focus Factory strategy, manufacturers can optimally manage time, organizational structure, system dynamics, and time-based management principles in all parts of the organization.
- Using blanket purchase orders rather than waiting for a new P.O. in cases where purchases are recurring or when changes need to be made in dollar amounts, quantities, goods and services, and/or the maximum order.
Capability
Does the partner you are considering have the production capabilities for your project?
In short, your partner must have the equipment to perform the job, provide facilities that are modern and well maintained, and have a plant designed for efficient workflow with flexible manufacturing systems. They should perform process monitoring, scientific injection molding, and decoupled molding to ensure that the best manufacturing process is performed.
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Your partner should have demonstrated success in designing and fabricating injection molds. They should be equipped with both horizontal and vertical molding presses, depending on your project needs. In addition, they should offer the highest level of standards for certification and decoupled molding processes.
Finally, the financial health of the company is an essential indicator of capability. A potential partner should be able to demonstrate proven success in overseeing operations, such as forecasting into the next quarter, and conducting inventory forecasts. A financially healthy partner not only has all of the equipment, processes, and personnel to complete your job, but has the capacity to acquire assets that will make your job run with optimal quality and efficiency.
Case Study: Finding the Right Injection Molding Partner Solves 3 Key Challenges
&#;We were looking to find a partner that could support our company&#;s entry into the biopharmaceutical market and also a partner that met all of the technical requirements for manufacturing molded parts for that market.&#; &#; Pharmaceutical Executive
Technical Challenges
A pharmaceutical company was seeking a partner to support entry into the biopharmaceutical market. They engaged a procurement specialist to research vendors. &#;We were looking to find a partner that met all of the technical requirements for manufacturing molded parts for that market,&#; an executive reports.
This company had the following criteria:
- Molded parts needed to be manufactured in an ISO Class & Clean Room.
- The supplier needed to be certified for manufacturing to the ISO Medical Devices Standard.
- The molding tools needed to be manufactured in the United States.
Design Challenges
The customer was seeking to stay with their total budget for three tools with multiple variations of the parts. This presented a significant budget hurdle, but Crescent Industries met the challenge by building injection molding tool sets with removable cavities that would utilize their Master Frame bases to house their tools during production runs.
Timing Challenges
The supplier needed to support a schedule to design and fabricate tooling and produce initial injection-molded parts with a quick turnaround. The solution to this problem was
- Working with a partner that could design and fabricate in-house
- Working with a partner that manufactured tools in the United States to avoid long transportation line times and the risk of shipping delays.
Last revised in , the 21-page guide was originally drafted in the early s by the Moldmakers Division of the Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI), now PLASTICS. It codified what are now widely accepted and used terms and definitions like Class 101 molds, as well as guidelines for the procurement process
Glenn Starkey, president of mold component and tool monitoring supplier Progressive Components, is leading the task force to revise the guide, along with Toby Bral of MSI Mold Builders (Cedar Rapids, Ia.) and Wally and Camille Sackett of Accede Mold & Tool (Rochester, N.Y.). Starkey is also the current chair of the Moldmakers Division of PLASTICS&#; Committee on Equipment Statistics.
The task force, which began meeting in September, is collaborating with Jennifer Jones, PLASTICS&#; director of industry standards. At this time, the group meets every three weeks to review the guide with Jones.
When it was first published, the guide was intended to help avoid misunderstandings and conflicts between toolmakers and tool buyers in the mold procurement process. The manual addresses topics such as mold classification, providing mold data sheets, practices of making payments, receiving progress reports and arranging a mold&#;s delivery.
Rather than scrapping the original content, Starkey said the work of the taskforce will primarily involve heavy editing and updating. At present, the guide has outdated references to everything from N.C. (numerical control) tape, mylars, hobs, and mandrels to pink carbon copies.
Practices for mold payments, mold qualification and warrantying mold performance are being reviewed. The revised guidelines also will have an updated mold data sheet, which serves as a checklist of the mold buyer&#;s needs and is used for quotations, and a progress report template for providing status during the various mold building stages.
An initial draft will be circulated to a consensus group once the task committee reviews the document&#;s structure and content. The consensus group consists of mold buyers and makers within PLASTICS. The same committee will also seek input from members of the American Mold Builders Association and the industry at large. While there isn&#;t an exact target completion date for the guide, the group expects to seek industry feedback in early . The task force is also reviewing the mold finish guides.
In an interview with Plastics Technology, Starkey said the guide has two primary aspects&#;describing the procurement process and setting classification. &#;What are practices of inquiry for quote, placing an order, setting deliveries, setting payments&#;business matter stuff,&#; Starkey said. &#;It describes how this interaction goes. It&#;s not like buying 100 sprockets&#;you&#;re buying a quantity of one and no two are alike.&#;
The classification element, meanwhile, formalizes expectations for a tool. &#;Instead of saying something subjective, like, &#;I want a really top-notch mold,&#; and on the other end: cheap and dirty&#;this gives it some definition.&#;
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