IMM's Plant Tour: Automation vs. emigration

Is there any better way to begin the New Year than by touring a 100% U.S. contract molding company born in the same town as U.S. injection molding itself?

In 1931 The Foster Grant Co. of Leominster, MA bought a German-built Eckert and Zeigler injection molding press and in so doing, it helped to launch IMM. OK, that’s not exactly the way the history of the U.S. molding business is told at the National Plastics Center & Museum, also of Leominster, MA, but you get the picture—a lot of good things for all of us came out of the Leominster area. Take Mar-Lee Cos., for instance.

In 1972 a moldmaking shop bearing the abbreviated names of the founder’s wife, Marion, and the founder, Leo, opened its doors in Leominster. Mar-Lee’s second employee, John Gravelle, today is president of this $18 million company, a company that’s growing at up to 25% a year in one of its major markets.

Gravelle and his associates have a business strategy that they believe is a viable alternative to “going global.”

“We must offer engineering-intensive value to compete both here and abroad,” says Gravelle. “We’ve committed our futures to serving specialty medical and value-added packaging markets, but we’re not committed to doing it like everyone else. We’re committed to going automated, rather than going offshore. And we’re fortunate to have customers as committed to our efforts as they are to us. We can compete on part costs with China, or with anybody else. On a landed cost basis, we are competitive.”

Does a company that began where it all began really point the way to a new beginning? Let’s see . . . and let’s tour.

Molding bioabsorbables

Our tour begins a little more than 5 miles Northwest of Leominster in Fitchburg, MA, home to Mar-Lee’s custom molding operations since 1995. It occupies two buildings here. One is dedicated to packaging and consumer products manufacturing. The other is its medical products manufacturing facility.

Our first stop is the medical plant. Mar-Lee specializes in molding bioabsorbable resins, such as Boehringer Ingelheim’s Purac polylactic acetate (PLA), which can cost up to $1100/lb. Gravelle says Mar-Lee is enjoying 20-25% yearly growth in molding bioabsorbables.

Inside a Class 100,000 cleanroom we see five self-contained cells, Star Automation robotics, and smaller-tonnage Engels (20-40 tons). They’re arrayed perpendicular to the far wall under the room’s 18-ft-high ceilings.

To our right against another wall are the drying ovens for PLA. Facing the window is a production monitoring computer system. “Detailed production documentation is the critical art of what we do here,” Gravelle says.

Looking left we see a Nikon video microscope. Gravelle tells us it can take snapshots of parts as small as .6g—smaller than a plastic pellet. Such micro-photos are e-mailed to customers for evaluation along with descriptive notes, he explains, adding, “We’re on kanban here, too, as we are in other projects.”

Mar-Lee built most of the molds for its bioabsorbable molding, though some were inherited. Its cleanroom is designed for easily adding enough space to double capacity.

An area formerly used as a warehouse is our next stop. It’s an HVAC-controlled cardboard-box-free “white room” dedicated to producing medical packaging products. Eight Engels up to 500 tons run here, though Gravelle says he plans to fill the room with more presses by Q3 2007.

Value-adding automation

We pass through the medical division’s QA room, pausing momentarily to admire the company’s Mitutoyo CMM, which Gravelle says is programmed to accurately measure a number of different products, including one large part with up to 257 dimensions.

Heading out the back door we spot NBE silos. Gravelle says his molding operations have six silos, ranging from 40,000- to 80,000-lb capacities, as we arrive at our next stop.

Gazing at its 30-ft-high ceilings, its epoxy-painted concrete flooring, and everything in between as we step into Mar-Lee’s big packaging and consumer products molding area, our first word is, “Wow!”

When it comes to high-volume, fully automated, cellular manufacturing, Gravelle puts his money where his mouth is. Most of Mar-Lee’s $2.5 million capital investment last year was in manufacturing cell automation and support infrastructure.

We’ve arrived as Mar-Lee is in the first week of production of a brand-new specialty packaging product line—covered container boxes with spring-loaded, pop-up lids. They’re molded on two Engel 750-tonners equipped with Engel’s own parts removal robots. And they’re oriented, assembled, and boxed in fully automated, beside-press workcells. Everything is automated—right down to the springs being fed from a vibratory bowl. An Allen-Bradley PanelView 700 oversees the beside-press automation.

A Staubli six-axis robot in each cell picks up the parts, examines them (using an artificial vision system, naturally), and closes the containers before they’re boxed. Only one human operator runs both cells, each of which is capable of producing a minimum of 18 million units/year.

Added-value employees

These cells were designed, built, and choreographed by Progressive Automated Systems (Kitchener, ON), a strategic ally of Engel. Automated material handling and conditioning systems at Mar-Lee are from Conair. A moment before moving on we pause to admire one of the eight-cavity molds in one of the two cells. It’s bearing the Husky marquee. Mar-Lee has recently standardized on Husky hot runners.

Gravelle says this mold is a typical Mar-Lee-built tool. It’s got hydraulically positioned side actions, eliminating long horn pins to reduce mold opening time. “Our molds are designed in conjunction with the automation. We don’t have to redesign molds to fit in our cells,” he says. Another fully automated cell nearby, this one with a 450-ton Engel, has been running an eight-cavity Mar-Lee stack mold 24/7 for more than three years, and has already produced more than 65 million parts.

Has automation meant Gravelle’s had to let people go?

“My employment number today is no higher than it was in 1998, but my payroll has gone up, because my skill-level requirements have increased,” he says. “We probably have one of the highest sales-per-employee ratios in the business—up to $180,000/employee, much higher than the industry average.”

Equipped with motion-detection lighting, Mar-Lee’s 20,000-ft2 warehouse is at the far end of the hall, and upstairs are the foreman’s office, a breakroom, and a QC room. Down below we spot a few older-vintage Niigata presses Gravelle says he’s looking to replace, possibly with all-electrics. “We have no intention of slowing down,” he says, as we head out for Mar-Lee Mold.

Lifetime guarantees

Mar-Lee has no intention of slowing down its moldmaking operations, either. Gravelle tells us he invested about $500,000 in the company’s moldmaking operations in 2005.

It produces up to about 40 molds/year for machines ranging up to 750 tons at its 25,000-ft2 moldbuilding facility in Leominster, which employs 16 machinists and three engineers working two 9-hour shifts, five days a week. Cavitation typically ranges from four to 16. It routinely works to ±.0002-inch tolerances.

“We never try to build our molds within a budget. We try to build the best we can—high-end, complex tooling,” he says. “I believe internal moldmaking is critically important to our high-volume production in manufacturing workcells. Workcell downtime can be extremely expensive, and we are routinely investing money into our customers’ molds.” Again, he puts his money where his mouth is. All new molds built and run by Mar-Lee are guaranteed for the life of a customer’s program, and customers never have to pay for mold maintenance or repair.

Mar-Lee’s moldmaking facility also is its corporate HQ. Accounting, payroll, and administrative offices are stationed here. Gravelle’s office is in Leominster, too. He says he spends about 60% of his time in the Leominster facility, portions of which are being renovated. The engineering room is being transformed into a lean training room. Mar-Lee applied for and received a two-year State matching grant of $180,000 for lean training and system upgrades. The grant was arranged for them through the Massachusetts Manufacturing Extension Partnership (Worcester, MA), which will conduct the training program.

Don’t wait—create

Mar-Lee’s also acquiring a new ERP system—Enterprise IQ software from IQMS. An entire room will be dedicated to its ERP operations. In addition, Mar-Lee’s building a brand-new engineering room. It uses SolidWorks and Cimatron software.

All of Mar-Lee’s moldmakers work in cellular manufacturing teams, with everything they need right at hand to support pull-through manufacturing.

Recent equipment additions include a super-rigid, 32,000-rpm Roku Roku HC548EX graphite electrode mill with a Fanuc 64-bit control from MC Machinery Systems. It’s accurate to within ±.0001 inch and repeatable to ±.00006 inch.

When required, copper electrodes are produced on Mar-Lee’s wire EDMs—a Mitsubishi FA10S, its latest, is about two years old. The company also purchased its second drop-tank Ingersoll Gantry 500 CNC sinker a couple of years ago. Mar-Lee does shrink-fit tool holding in-house, using an Emuge Franken Shrink-Master HL-1. It has standardized on System 3R toolholders.

As we’re leaving, we pause by the door, admiring an old Instron Rockwell hardness tester that Mar-Lee purchased in 1972 for $325. It sits in a wood and glass case, but it’s still used today. “You have to make your own future,” Gravelle says. “You can’t wait for the economy, or for the politics, or for anything else to turn things around. You’ve got to create your own opportunities.”

You can read an interview with Gravelle about Mar-Lee’s alternative global business approach at http://www.immnet.com/articles?article=3078.