Vangest Group Could Be The Future Of Mold Firms

Stepping into the headquarters and technical center of the Vangest Group in Marinha Grande, Portugal, is like stepping into a new world, which is probably what co-directors Carlos and Victor Oliveira intended.

Vangest is an abbreviation of the Portuguese for “Vanguard of Management.” In Marinha Grande, the heart of Portugal’s mold industry, Vangest has 14 small, independently-run companies, most of them under the same roof. There, an idea can be taken through to the finished product – from design and development, rapid prototyping and tooling, mold production, short-series molding, and to assembly.

“Our philosophy is to have separate companies focused in niches,” says Victor Oliveira. “If the customer wants a new concept, just a prototype, a design, or a mold, we can come into the process wherever they want. But our strength is in integrating processes.” The benefits are simplified logistics, lower costs, and faster turnaround times.

Vangest, with around $25 million in annual revenue, has just over 200 direct employees, most of them engineers, although it uses many subcontractors.

The company began to take shape in 1986, when Carlos Oliveira, a mechanical engineer like his brother Victor, started Moliporex, a mold project, engineering, and trading company. Victor joined the company in 1991 possessing industry experience in CADCAM. In that same year, they established two additional companies: Distrim, to sell and develop IBM/Dassault’s Catia suite of CAD/CAM/CAE programs for moldmaking; and Harchi, to conduct management and project development.

Six years later, the brothers set up four more companies, and in the late 1990s, Moliporex went into moldmaking. CADForm does design and product development. Distrim 2 specializes in product engineering, rapid prototyping, and tooling. Industrial design firm GranDesign develops household and telecom products as well as automotive parts. (It recently designed a toaster and a coffee maker that Black & Decker will produce in China — Moliporex is handling the tooling — as well as the wheels of the BMW Mini.) Nextvision handles computer hardware distribution and the development of CAD software and Intranet and Internet models.

Vangest added another four subsidiaries in 1998, including 3D Tech (aluminum molds), CadFlow (a CAD and CAE software distributor), and DDM Espanha, in Bilbao, Spain, a Delcam CAD/CAM software distributor. Moliporex also set up a production operation in Joinville, Brazil.

“R&D is very important for us,” Oliveira says, noting that Distrim 2 picked up the 2002 award for R&D from the Portuguese Association for Young Entrepreneurs. “We are developing much of our own software. Our big advantage is that we are in touch with people in production. We are not just code writers.”

He highlights a project at Nextvision on virtual prototyping, which should come to fruition in four or five years, conducted with the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics in Darmstadt, Germany.

Conceito XXI, which manages complete projects, especially for telecom goods, was established in 2000. It was awarded a contract by Portugal’s newest mobile-phone operator, OniWay, to develop an experimental system so people could try out its new UMTS multimedia phones in retail shops. It also developed the packaging.

Also founded in 2000 was 3D Tek, the Spanish arm of 3D Tech. ConceptCad (3-D mold project design and CAE) started up in 2001, and Vangest established tool production in Barcelona, Spain, with Moliporex Iberia.

“Moldmaking is no longer at the center of our business,” says Oliveira. “We don’t sell a mold, we sell concepts.” They seem to sell well, as customers include Bosch, Ericsson, Fiat, General Electric, Honda, Mercedes, Philips, Porsche, and Swatch.

The primary markets for the company are northern Europe, as well as Brazil and Spain, and it is now re-affirming a commitment to North America. “We once had a good partnership there, but we got lazy,” Oliveira admits. Vangest appears unlikely to make that mistake again.