U.S. moldmakers need to get on the stick

Moldmakers in the U.S. can no longer rest on their laurels and expect OEMs to ignore the favorable lead times from off-shore mold shops. That's the message three OEMs gave molders and moldmakers meeting in Coronado, CA for the annual SPI Western Section Conference.

Oscar Miramontes, engineering manager in El Paso, TX for the Philips Components division of Philips Consumer Electronics, told attendees, "We need to reduce mold design and fabrication time from 16 to 20 weeks to 8 to 12 weeks. For that, moldmakers need to introduce soft mold technology to not only reduce lead times but to reduce mold costs and provide flexibility for engineering changes."

He also notes that moldmakers need to improve their CAD/CAM systems by upgrading software in order to maximize concurrent engineering technology. "We still have a long way to go with respect to concurrent engineering and we need more compatibility," he says. "We need to be able to speak the same language."

Miramontes says companies such as Philips are caught in the middle - on one hand being driven by the consumer and on the other, being pulled by suppliers. "The electronics industry is trying to accelerate others," he says. "We demand a lot from plastics and from our toolmakers."

Faster lead times on molds is a fact of life, yet Miramontes says he's experienced various levels of resistance from U.S. moldmakers. "Asian moldmakers responded," he notes, "and U.S. moldmakers had to catch up because they're behind in lead times."

Because of shorter product life cycles, many OEMs have asked moldmakers to look at soft tooling and to rethink how OEMs can achieve quantity requirements. Spencer Barnes, plastics engineering manager for Hewlett-Packard's Vancouver, WA operations, says that, for example, maybe it's better to build 10 P-20 tools to mold 100,000 parts each than one large, hardened steel mold to mold a million parts. Barnes pointed out that the printer market window is two to three months.

"It is indeed the market that drives us and we must provide refreshed products," says Barnes. "That means steeper ramp times, lots of P-20 tools, some single cavity to start, then behind those come the multicavity, hardened molds. Moldmakers must react to this need."

Tony Matlock, plant manager for Rain Bird's Camsco Manufacturing in Azusa, CA, says his company comes out with a new product every six months within its various business units. An average of 10 to 60 molds is required for a typical program, and redesign during mold build is a critical area for the company.

To minimize tool rework and engineering changes, moldmakers need to find ways to simulate the function of the parts because of the research and development that takes place during the product's build, says Matlock.

One moldmaker in attendance made the statement that OEMs will eventually return to have all their mold requirements built in the United States because U.S. moldmakers still produce the best molds in the world, expressing the belief among many moldmakers that offshore tooling is of poor quality.

In disagreeing with that, H-P's Barnes re-emphasizes something he told attendees of another plastics industry meeting recently. "Hell no, we won't be back," he says emphatically, "because we aren't getting junk from offshore sources."

Matlock says U.S. moldmakers need to rethink the way they do business in today's global environment. "The tooling industry needs to be operated from more of a business philosophy than from the standpoint of a craft," he says.