Selling value cements relationships; the customer’s request is a great starting point

Moldmakers and molders tend to follow their customers’ instructions: Build molds to print specifications and make the parts per the process required by the OEM. One mold manufacturer and custom molder looked beyond the customer’s requirements to create an innovative solution.

Do you know clearly what your competitive edge is? Industrial Molds Group does. Situated in Rockford, IL, this dual-headed company, consisting of Industrial Molds, a precision injection mold manufacturer, and sister company Pyramid Plastics, an injection molder, finds that its ability to see solutions beyond its customers’ problems often makes the job of selling value over price much easier.

“Sometimes the solution wasn’t even what the customer had in mind in the first place,” says Tim Peterson, president of Industrial Molds Group (IMG). “Using the expertise of Industrial Molds Group’s engineering team, not only can we often come up with a totally different solution to the original problem, but the results exceeded what the customer anticipated.”

In one project, a customer came to IMG for help on a part it was supplying to the automotive industry. Its process had always required molding the nylon parts in one injection molding machine, manually transferring the parts to another press nearby, hand-loading the parts into the cavity of a second mold, and overmolding the nylon parts with a thermoplastic elastomer (TPE).



To reduce the cost of producing this part, automating the transfer and hand-loading process seemed to be the logical answer, so IMG’s customer added a robot to handle parts loading. But the parts’ tiny size made this a challenge. “The parts were so small that it was difficult for a robot to grab and place them correctly in the second molding press, which created quality problems,” explains Industrial Molds’ engineering account manager Kerry Smith. “The customer knew they would have problems following the processing path they had always taken, so when they came to us, their question was, ‘How do we transfer these parts successfully to another press and load them into the second mold for overmolding?’”



Industrial Molds saw the problem in a different light, Smith says: IMG needed better processing technology.

“From their viewpoint, they had a logistics problem that included how to pick the parts from one mold and place the parts successfully in the second mold using a robot, which proved very difficult. Even if they could do it, that process wouldn’t get them to where they needed to go,” Smith says.

IMG’s customer was getting pounded on part price, something that wouldn’t improve if it followed its traditional manufacturing process. The existing cost structure included two molds, two injection molding machines, and the robotics to interface the two presses. All of this made the total cost-to-manufacture of these parts too great for it to be profitable.

Bringing its expertise in processing, Industrial Molds convinced the customer that this part was perfect for a two-shot molding process: Only one mold/molding presses was needed instead of two; no transfer automation was required, saving on capital equipment; and changing the machine to machine transfer rate with rotating the B platen resulted in a shorter cycle.



A two-shot mold was built that molded the nylon substrate first, and then a second shot overmolded the TPE to make complete parts with one mold in one press. In the two-shot process Industrial Molds designed, the parts are removed by end-of-arm tooling and presented to a vision system to ensure 100% filled product, Smith explains. “The shot on the overmold process fills into very small areas, and any slight processing hiccup can result in a short,” he adds. “The rare nonconforming part can be scrapped and not shipped.

”

The next step was helping the customer with processing. Industrial Molds performs mold qualifications and short-run production at Pyramid Plastics, which also has two-shot molding capabilities. Pyramid qualified the mold and demonstrated to the customer how the two-shot process worked. “Using the two-shot molding technology brought the customer’s part cost down so that even with the expenditure for the new mold, they could easily cost-justify it on their bottom line and get a quick return on investment,” says Peterson. “Needless to say, the customer was very pleased with the outcome, and liked the fact that we could also run parts for them.”



While the customer has long-range plans to purchase a two-shot molding press for its own molding operations, it is continuing to run the parts at Pyramid Plastics for the short term. 



“We bring creativity backed by knowledge and experience to the marketplace,” says Smith. “With our ability to provide a range of services, we can meet the customers’ challenges with a fresh approach that will save them money and be more productive in the long run.” —Clare Goldsberry