Plant tour: Values-added molding

It isn’t a typo. Our plant tour this month takes us to a molding organization where the customer service values it practices power the value-added products it provides to its customers.

In February at the Molding 2008 conference and expo in San Francisco, Deb Weis told us that her company had already booked enough business to ensure 15% growth this year and that she had invested in new manufacturing technology.

Weis also said she’d hired new people with expertise in automated manufacturing solutions, that she’d invested heavily in training over the last three years, and that her company actively measures key cost-reducing initiatives, like cycle time optimization.

Deb Weis, owner, president, and CEO of Engineered Plastics Corp., believes everyone at EPC works to achieve customer satisfaction by sharing working values that foster pride and build trust.

Deb Weis is owner, president, and CEO of Engineered Plastics Corp. (EPC) in Menomonee Falls, WI. EPC is a certified woman-owned business. It obtained its certification from the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (Washington, DC; www.wbenc.org), reportedly the largest third-party certifier of businesses owned and operated by women in the U.S.

She’s also the creator and chairperson of what’s become the annual Molding conference’s Best Practices forum—a popular session during which molders share their secrets for success with attendees.

Weis agreed to let us take a tour of EPC and said we could bring a few friends along, too.

So, let’s tour.

Values evaluations

Upon arriving at EPC, Weis and John H. Papineau, EPC’s business development VP, usher us into a conference room where we’re introduced to a few of their associates—Sandy Kriefall, director of operations; Terry Hartman, quality director; Angela Frambs, customer service manager; and Jim Spyers-Duran, director of lean initiatives.

Then we’re shown samples of some of the extremely complex products EPC produces. Its specialty is water filtration and treatment products. Such parts, we’re told, often provide service lives of 20-30 years.

Before she bought EPC in 1987, Weis worked for a number of local molders. She started out working setup in a molder’s sampling and prototyping department. “That’s one reason why our setup staff is near and dear to my heart,” she says.

When we ask Papineau how he came to EPC, we hear the company’s magic word for the first time—values. “One reason I came to work here was this company’s values-driven principles. Some 50% of our performance evaluation criteria are values-based … ethics-based. We’ve discharged people who were extremely technologically proficient, because of their values,” he says.

“Our foundation, our corporate structure, our bedrock is customer service. It’s what we value most,” Weis adds.

Responsible responsiveness

We spend a considerable amount of time communicating with one another,” Papineau continues. “We have hourly meetings every shift, every month, covering such issues as our financials, quality, and safety. Everyone’s involved in these meetings—everyone—including our hourlies. And we pay an hour of overtime to cover the time spent.”

“We’ve hired people who came here because of our values,” adds Kriefall. “It’s the way Deb’s always managed the business. Behavior here is just as important as technical acumen.”

“We receive very high ratings on our customer service,” says Frambs. “Our high scores come from our dedication to such things as our responsiveness to changes in orders, and the low inventories we maintain, both here and at our customers’ facilities.”

Spyers-Duran says, “I think our Kan-Ban and EDI practices at all levels, including engineering, have a positive impact on those good grades.”

And Hartman adds, “Some of our operating systems may have started with customer requests, but we’ve always been into continuous improvement.”

Proactive problem-solving

Our customer list isn’t very long,” says Weis on our way to the shop. “We look for customers who value our service, as much as our contract manufacturing capabilities.”

“We work on improving tool designs for DFMA, we assist our customers on their material selection, and help them design parts for automated manufacturing—we even design robot end-of-arm tooling here, as well as other automation solutions,” says Weis.

EPC provides its engineering service up front and performs the production part approval process (PPAP) on all of its parts through EDI—there’s no paperwork involved.

“We try to tie together all the loose ends between our customers, their parts, and our services to ensure coordination between everyone and everything involved,” Papineau adds. After everything’s set in stone, EPC’s cost-reduction team optimizes the process and fine-tunes the automation.

Designed-and-built in-house, this cart facilitates set-up and troubleshooting.

EPC engineers run SolidWorks and are specialists in DFMA.

Digital displays around the shop let everyone monitor production.

EPC uses heat-staking systems to ensure secure insert placement.

A recent addition to EPC’s services is LSR molding.

Preventive maintenance is aggressively practiced on 250 active molds.

Through Kaizen, there’s detailed set-up instructions for each mold.

Valuable visions

Out in the shop, Kriefall points to the digital displays suspended from the walls and ceiling, indications, he explains, of EPC’s dedication to its “visual factory” concept. “All the information our Mattec production monitoring system collects does little good on a computer in an office. We want the information displayed where the decisions are being made—right on the shop floor—to speed accurate decision making.”

A large, main display screen is on the far wall. Smaller screens suspended from the ceiling around the shop display basic stats such as machine and part numbers, hours-to-go for jobs, and scrap alerts in both percentages and dollars to speed responsiveness. The system provides sonic, as well as visual alerts—specific sounds for specific tasks.

Kriefall says, “We’re planning to upgrade to the next version—a system with full graphics, allowing virtually anything on a computer screen to be displayed in the shop.”

EPC’s maintenance personnel, technicians, and materials handlers also have cellphones and walkie-talkies. “There’s no need to page anyone. No one has to walk around looking for something or someone.”

Multitasking manufacturers

“If we can’t do it in the press, or at cycle, we’ll do it manually. We work in conjunction with a partner company nearby that outsources personnel,” Weis explains.

This partner company is a non-profit contract manufacturing and packaging outsourcing firm called Step Industries Inc. (Neenah and Milwaukee, WI; www.stepindustries.com), which Weis helped launch. Step Industries provides employment opportunities to folks recovering from alcoholism or drug addiction.

“I’d say 40% of our hires in the last 18 months are people from Step Industries,” she says.

Every EPC machine operator is trained to do every job at the plant. Weis says this practice eliminates monotony, adds to employee income incentives, and improves scheduling. Everyone also serves on the safety committee for a year.

We spot a closed-loop chiller from AEC. It’s periodically checked and, if necessary, treated for chemical corrosion resistance. MPI liquid color feeders, Bunting Magnetics metal separators, Ball & Jewel grinders, and D-M-E mold temperature controllers are in evidence. All of EPC’s molds are hot-runner molds.

A 12-hopper centralized materials handling and drying system capable of performing four color and materials changeovers in less than 10 minutes feeds most of the machines. EPC plans to upgrade this system to one from Novatec. If no material is called for in, say, four hours, it wants its dryers to set back the temperatures automatically, eliminating degradation caused by overdrying.

Perfected processes

In a dedicated, three-machine cell, natural HDPE is fed from two silos to two Van Dorns used to mold products that stretch the literal definition of water filtration systems—they’re minnow bait boxes for fishermen.

“We can do everything, up to and including fully-automated production,” says Papineau. “We spend considerable time right at the start of a project in process development, and we make sure we are holding to it at every cycle, including startup. If we are, then we’re sure we’re making good parts.”

A 300-tonner nearby is running a two-cavity mold we’re told has slides in every direction and an unscrewing core. It’s producing complex, concentricity-critical, long-strand-glass-filled parts used in a water softener. EPC developed a semi-automated, inline heat-staking system that preheats the inserts, mushrooming them securely into place when they’re inserted into the bottom of the parts. This system substantially reduced cycle times, while also exceeding its customer’s insert pullout force requirements. You can read more about it on EPC’s website.

In another job, EPC uses the Emabond electromagnetic assembly bonding system from Emabond Solutions LLC (Norwood, NJ; www.emabond.com) to permanently bond metal-filled PE seals and gaskets onto thick-walled, pressure-resistant, long-glass-fiber-filled PE tanks.

Smart strategies

“Our suppliers, Wacker, Engel, and Fluid Automation, agree that this is probably one of the most sophisticated, complex molds out there,” says Papineau, showing us one of EPC’s latest ventures. It’s running flash-free LSR parts in a four-cavity, cold-deck, valve-gated mold.

“We have to learn more about LSR,” says Weis. “It will compliment our expertise in water filtration and materials. I believe valves with molded-in LSR gaskets and seals are the next big thing for us.” To that end, EPC is already investigating self-adhesive silicones. “Emabond … LSR …they’re just other materials and processes we have to use. We’ll adapt. It’s not rocket science.”

When asked if she has any plans for global expansion, Weis says, “Life is bigger than plastics. We’re not trying to be all things to all the people in the entire world. We think we can carve out a good living right here in the Upper Midwest. We feel we can service locally, and compete globally…in fact, we’ve even designed a brand-new facility to do that even better.”