Focus: Packaging:One packaging toolmaker meets need for speed

While the down economy had most moldmakers cutting back, one packaging mold specialist was investing almost $2 million in customer service. The only cutback was in mold turnaround time.

Roughly four of every five molds that F&S Tool (Erie, PA) makes are for packaging applications. The others serve a variety of markets including medical and housewares, and even most of these are high-cavitation, high-speed, complex hot runner tooling. Virtually all of the current—and many of the emerging—packaging technologies are house standards here: living hinges, push-pulls, and so on.

The packaging industry’s relentless search for design and functionality to create product differentiation, along with its shrinking product life cycles, has made it an ardent seeker of shorter production turnaround. As F&S president Michael Faulkner says, “Our customers have continually pushed the lead-time envelope from concept to the marketplace.”

Buying Time

Seeing a chance to tear a big chunk out of the lead-time envelope, F&S recently completed work on its new Product Development Center (PDC). Bringing F&S total floor space to more than 27,000 sq ft, the new PDC houses three new high-speed injection machines along with other equipment. All told, it represents a $1.7 million investment. It also means that all the company’s molds can be tested, sampled, and debugged on premises, rather than taken to local molders, as had been the norm. The company’s original estimate that it could cut two to three weeks from a delivery schedule has proven out in practice.

F&S has always prided itself on cutting time out of delivery cycles, but this is a major time saver. The molding machines are 50 ft from the mold assembly area; they do not have to be trucked anywhere, nor trucked back. There is no need to join a job queue in another molding shop; internal scheduling gives the PDC enough notice that a machine is ready when the tool is. Sampling can be—and mostly is—done on the same day the tool is ready. No one from F&S has to travel to another shop, and even more important, everyone who worked on the mold is in the building, available for discussion.

Buying Quality, Too

Time was not the only motivating factor behind the decision to invest in the PDC, and neither was the fact that it made life less hectic for everyone at F&S. The company knew that with more time to dial in and tweak the process, it could deliver a better-quality product to the customer because the tool would be much further along the startup timeline when delivered. When it added the Center, F&S put a full-time processing engineer on staff to ensure that the customer would, in fact, get up to production speed faster.

J.D. Faulkner, who heads up manufacturing at F&S, says having the PDC gives the company enough time to truly optimize process cycles prior to delivery. This gives customers the maximum benefit from an F&S tool. And even with F&S taking extra run-in time, the mold still arrives one and one-half to two weeks faster than it would have before the PDC went operational.

The injection machines in the PDC include a 100-ton Demag, a 300-ton Husky, and a 500-ton Husky Hylectric. Plans call for another 200-ton system as well as a single-stage compression press for the compression tools F&S builds. The Husky Hylectric provides the way to test large molds on the kind of high-performance press that many F&S customers have or are acquiring. Equipped with oversized platens, it also lets stack molds be tested in-house. The PDC design includes a spacious Line Trial Bay equipped with a silo and power and water connections so a customer can bring in a machine for thorough mold proving and parameter setting, including peripherals and downstream operations.

Customers Enthusiastic

The Development Center opened at the end of August 2003 and ramped up to full operation by the end of November. Jim Dinger, who runs sales and marketing, says F&S might have set up the PDC sooner, but there were concerns that customers might see it as competition. Turns out the concerns were totally misplaced. Customers were immediately positive, and could instantly recognize the time benefit—plus something more. Since F&S now has high-performance production machines, it can help customers who need prototype and/or early production parts in a hurry.

For example, one customer with a very large distribution chain needed to presell its distributors prior to the launch of a new product. The customer’s sales force and the sales forces of each distributor needed samples to work with before the launch, and the samples had to be “real.”

Problem: The customer had a fully booked factory and did not want to disturb ongoing manufacturing. Solution: The F&S PDC supplied more than enough of the “real” new product to give salespeople their samples and to stock trade show displays. The company added value by solving a customer problem, and short-run, stopgap production has since become a normal F&S service.

In addition to the new machines and the process engineer, F&S has dedicated a full-time specialist to hot runner and manifold inspection, repair, and rebuilds. The company went to 3-D design software (SolidWorks) several years ago, and there is a team of in-house designers supporting customer product development.

The company also added a Zeiss Vista coordinate measuring machine to support process quality control. Located in the toolroom adjacent to the PDC, the CMM is also used to verify mold components and provides immediate testing and reporting for customers with rush projects.

In 1983, Michael and his father, Jim Faulkner, started F&S Tool in an 800-sq-ft facility. Though the senior Faulkner is no longer active in the business, Michael’s brothers J.D., Scott, and Tim help keep a family emphasis in the 55-person firm.

Investing in the Product Development Center is not unusual for F&S. When it wanted a shop floor control system but couldn’t find a package that did everything it wanted, it developed and implemented a proprietary system that Dinger says has proven to be more than worth the effort. Solidly established in lean manufacturing thinking, the company is close to ISO certification, with a head start from the analysis done to develop the shop floor control software.