Specializing in tool trials

When moldmaker Tibor Kincses moved to Flora, MS from Chicago, he was somewhat of a pioneer. In 1973, there weren't many mold shops in the state, and he saw an opportunity to fill a badly needed niche. Kincses offered molds and spare tooling for close tolerance components to companies inside and outside the state.

The company focused on building molds for challenging products. It specializes in intricate components, including hot runner molds. The company now offers state-of-the-art CNC equipment, a Charmilles 310 wire EDM in a climate controlled room, sinker EDMs, and in-house heat treating. Engineering services include design using Unigraphics II and CadKey 97, 3-D solid modeling systems on four CAD stations, and electronic data interchange (EDI) for prints.

Today, in addition to moldmaking, Kincses operates a total of 20 injection molding presses, from Arburg, Toyo, and Shinwa Seiki, ranging in size from 50 to 245 tons. The company is dedicated to serving the automotive industry, primarily General Motors, which has assessed and certified the company for its Targets for Excellence quality program.

Over the years, the company has developed expertise in taking problem molds, improving them, and then running those molds in-house. The company will now functionally de-bug molds for OEM customers that have in-house molding capabilities or who use other, outside molding vendors. The service is offered to any customer regardless of where the mold was built.

"We found a lot of tools were retrieved too soon by the OEM, and, consequently, many had problems," says Kincses. "We keep the tooling and run production for six months to a year to prove the tooling, keeping reports on all mold maintenance, changes in engineering, and repairs as well as the quality history of the parts."

The company started with just three or four employees, explains his son Mike, who now serves as president. "We still find a lack of skilled moldmakers and support shops in this area," he says. "We have to do a lot of our own training and education, but it has paid off. Through the years, we've been successful in training and developing some very good moldmakers."

In 1982, Kincses began offering full-service production molding capabilities and has continually expanded its physical space from the original 5000-sq-ft facility to the 52,000 square feet it currently occupies. That includes a newly completed, 25,000-sq-ft addition to accommodate new molding equipment.

"It was a move we had to make to take us to the next level," explains Mike Kincses. "[Molding operations] were in a separate building down the road, which created inefficiencies as well as duplicate management of systems. Being under one roof has helped us streamline our entire operation."

Demanding Customers

A year ago, the company received its QS 9000 certification for automotive OEMs as well as its ISO-9002 certification to meet requirements of other customers in the housewares, telecommunications, and medical components industries. Much of the company's automotive business comes from OEMs outside the state of Mississippi; however, Kincses does work with OEMs that have facilities locally as well. The company's quality systems and other procedures are geared toward that industry.

"As we became more familiar with the automotive environment, we established our systems to match their requirements," says Kincses. "We worked very hard on our quality systems to become certified," he says, "including the way we monitor our processes and develop our control plans and guidelines for ensuring our internal customers understand all the requirements of the parts we produce; not just the cosmetics but the functional as well."

Being an automotive supplier has pushed Kincses to become a better molder for all its customers. "It forces us to look at things more closely and to be more precise with our procedures to accommodate the JIT systems," he says. "The automotive industry expects that of us."