IMM Plant Tour: Connectors and connections

Carrera Corp., headquartered in Latrobe, PA, has been in the custom injection molding business since 1984, serving primarily automotive, healthcare, and electronic/telecommunications OEMs. Today, Carrera has five manufacturing facilities located in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Arizona. Four years ago, as part of its "Southwest strategy," Doug Wood and his brother Dan, owners of Carrera, decided to locate a plant in Tucson, AZ.

Tucson was chosen for several reasons. The company, in an effort to get closer to its major customers' Mexico maquiladora operations, realized the Southwest provided an excellent opportunity for growth. Being positioned in Tucson allows the company to react faster to customer requirements and to provide just-in-time shipments to these customers. Another major factor in Carrera's decision to locate in Tucson is the area's superior quality of life for the company's employees.

Carrera's Tucson operations focus primarily on molding small, tight toleranced components and connectors for the automotive, computer, and telecommunications industries. The Tucson operation actually consists of two nearly identical plants located within 200 yards of each other in a Tucson business park.

Each facility is approximately 20,000 sq ft and operates with the manufacturing cell concept. When Carrera outgrew its first building, housing 12 injection molding presses, the company built the second building, which today houses 15 presses.

This is in keeping with Carrera's corporate philosophy: A 15-press facility is an ideal size to allow the management to be totally focused on the customers' needs and not overly worried about overhead. Gary Hollingshead, director of operations, western region, says when plants get larger, the cost of overhead becomes exponentially greater. "Smaller plants are easier to manage and easier to schedule," he adds.

The two plants share resources such as engineering and quality planning to make it very cost effective. Because of this, the administrative offices are housed in the first facility while the second plant is strictly a production facility with access restricted to employees only. Both facilities are certified QS 9000 and ISO 9002, as are all the Carrera Corp. plants.

Plant Layout and Production

Carrera's Tucson facilities each include an air-conditioned production floor that closely resembles a cleanroom medical molding plant. Hollingshead explains that although they are not officially cleanroom molding facilities, they are exceptionally clean environments. "I come from a medical molding background, and I believe a clean plant is one that is safer, and the attitude of the people who work in a clean environment is much better," he says.

The first facility currently contains nine injection molding presses ranging from 60 to 120 tons of clamp. However, there is room for an additional three presses the company plans to purchase at a later date.

The second plant houses 15 presses ranging from 55 to 180 tons. The plants use a combination of presses from Nissei and JSW, both hydraulic and toggle machines. The newest 120-ton press, however, is all-electric. Given that energy costs are a big component of plastics processing, the company already is seeing significant savings in electricity with the all-electric. Hollingshead says that, as a result of these savings, the company is looking seriously at purchasing only all-electric machines in the future.

"We've done studies and found the all-electric machines use half as much power as hydraulics," he says.

Each press is equipped with a sprue picker from Automated Assemblies to ease the separation of runners from parts, freeing the operators to concentrate on inspecting the parts and increasing overall production efficiency. The automation certainly prevents the confusion experienced by one new operator who tried to throw away the parts and keep the runner. Hollingshead jokes that she couldn't believe anyone used parts so small.

The production floor is completely enclosed with all the material handling, raw material, and finished goods storage kept in an area surrounding production. This provides easy access to the production floor while keeping dust and contamination in the production area to an absolute minimum. Auxiliary equipment consists of Conair, AEC, Matsui, and Automated Assemblies brands.

Carrera uses a variety of engineering thermoplastic materials, both filled and unfilled, including nylons, polyetherimide, PBT, and LCP. Most of the material used is purchased in bags and some gaylords. Because of the size of the parts molded at Carrera, 10,000 parts can sometimes weigh less than a pound and be packaged in a sandwich bag. This means space needed for raw materials and finished goods storage is minimal.

Molds and Tooling

Specializing in small, high-precision components, such as connectors, often requires precise molding to tolerances that can stack up to .001 inch. Connectors can have many critical dimensions with various configurations, meaning the molds used tend to be one- or two-cavity molds with many interchangeable inserts, some of them extremely small.

This tends to make the changeovers very complicated and tedious. Some even require the moldmakers to use a microscope to assemble the insert for specific configurations. For example, Carrera recently received 100 inserts in a plastic bag that made a package the size of a man's watch.

Carrera doesn't build molds but has a group of key vendors located near their Pennsylvania operations that fulfill its tooling requirements. Bill Batsa, director of technology, has actively been working to develop an equivalent base of mold shops in the Southwest that are capable of making the tiny components to the exacting tolerances required.

Because of the size and complexity of the molds Carrera runs, it's rare that the company runs a high-cavitation mold. Smaller molds with fewer cavities mean greater processing control and better quality. Batsa says the trend, particularly in the connector industry, is toward molds with fewer cavities as a means to maintain high quality and production efficiencies for parts with tight tolerances and a high degree of complexity.

Carrera recently expanded its engineering department in Tucson to be able to provide more of these types of services to its customers locally. A Unigraphics station and an AutoCAD 14 station were added, giving the company the ability to send and translate files electronically.

Engineering and mold design is a critical component of Carrera's business. Many times, customers ask the company to do the next-to-impossible when it comes to designing and molding a new component. How-ever, the company's expertise in the areas of engineering and designing molds for extremely small components allows them to be creative and provide solutions for its customers' requirements for such parts.

Decentralized Operations

When asked about some of the challenges Carrera encountered locating satellite facilities outside the Pennsylvania area, Dan Wood replies that one is "communicating in an efficient manner and ensuring that the Carrera culture isn't lost along the way."

To address the communication concerns between the satellite plants, Carrera Corp. implemented a corporate Wide Area Network (WAN) using frame relay technology. This WAN allows on-line, real-time communications with each plant's Local Area Network (LAN) servers, as well as eliminating long distance plant-to-plant telecommunication costs.

To ensure corporate culture isn't lost at its satellite facilities, Carrera works hard to promote employees from within, and staff members from the home office visit each plant on a regular basis. Dan Wood adds, "Our employees' attention to detail and their total commitment to giving the customers what they want when they want it makes running multiple plants in different locations a lot easier."