All too often people quote “Please quote the design and build a class A mold, capable of producing x, xxx, xxx, xxx parts per the attached design with a CpK of 1.33” What have you really asked for? Did they even ask the right question? Or, is it like your 8 year old daughter answering your question with “Because”, thinking it’s a complete answer.

What’s a ‘Class A’ Mold?

Capable of producing x, xxx, xxx, xxx parts over the life of the tool or annually?

Can the parts even be made to your design? Who says so?

A CpK has cut all your tolerances in half. Can anybody make those parts?

Simply shot-gunning the above quote to five vendors (plus the one you picked offshore only because they took out an ad in a trade magazine or you received one of their bulk e-mails) will only result in six completely different quotes with different size and different technology molds. This give you NO information. Unfortunately what usually happens is someone picks the low bidder and you’re stuck with what you have.

First you need to know your annual volumes. If you don’t have that take what marketing calls a three year life span and divide by three. There are several economic formulas that will tell you how many operating cavities you’ll need to support this volume. If you have big parts, this may mean multiple tools. It may also come back and say you need 250 operating cavities. Unless your part is really simple you haven’t got a prayer building a mold with that many cavities that you can control.

Now you need to know what kind of a tool is best for your part: Two Plate, three plate, hot runner, insulated runner, valve gates, tab gates, sub gates or a combo tool using any of the runnerless technologies combined with conventional sprue/runner designs.

What’s the answer? Actually it’s simple: COMMUNICATION

If you don’t know (exactly) what kind of tool, what technology (no Injection Molding isn’t the only one out there), what kind of steel (Why steel in the first place?) and how many cavities are the best for you, hire someone who does. This person you hire must be able to do several things:

1. Not only recommend how to write the request for quote, but explain to you in simple language why it’s written that way.
2. He must be able to come up with tooling sources that have proven that are familiar with parts similar to what you’re looking to produce, and show you the proof – while hiring your friends might be nice in these economic times, you’re betting the future of your company on this part and friendship has nothing to do with it.
3. He must use specific and exacting tooling specifications. There’s no such thing as a ‘Class A’ tool. Some people use the SPI designations, but if you look at those they are very vague.
4. He must be able to prove to you your mold isn’t going to be a Maintenance Money Pit before you build it.
5. He must show you industry standards for tolerancing and show you that what you want is within those tolerances.

While this consultant may seem expensive by the hour, remember a good tool costs about the same as a house. Paying a few thousand to assure it will do what you want is a good investment.

Once you’ve chosen a tool shop capable of making your mold, you must have a weekly progress report assuring you it is on time and on schedule. All too many people will place a job for several hundred thousand dollars and then begin calling the tooling source two weeks before its delivery asking when it will be ready. They usually find out it won’t be ready on time.

If your only interest is in procuring parts, you should have purchased this tooling expertise from a molding house. However, they should have demonstrated expertise making parts in the volumes you want to the tolerances you need before you give them the work.

Once you’ve built the tool, not only try it out to see if it makes parts, but OPTIMIZE the cycle. You’ll need your designer, engineer, quality person and buyer present. Before everything is over, get a signed document on the definition of a good part. In the end you only want a pipeline full of functional, cosmetically acceptable parts. Since you’re not willing to pay for the Crown Jewels, don’t ask for them.

Things to avoid:

“We have velly hard workers and goode machines” If you tooling source’s website looks like it was written by an 11 year old, it probably was.

“We’re doing OK’ – instead of a progress report. Before you place the job have them show you the progress reporting form they use. If they don’t have one, what does that tell you?

Never pay more than 50% of the quoted amount before you get good parts. Conversely, never hold back money ‘just to keep them honest’ – who’s being dishonest here?

“You can process that dimension in” Maybe you can, but why should you? You’re purchasing a mold that supposedly will give you the widest possible process latitude, not a narrow one to get a dimension correct because the tool maker couldn’t.

Having a good tool made is like finding a marriage partner. If you go in blind, you get what you deserve. If you take the time to see how the relationship will work before you commit to it, your life will be easier.

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You can read this, nod your head knowingly and place the job with ‘the low bidder’ with a shop whose major asset is its location where you can do some really nifty shopping. Congratulations you just purchased a very expensive boat anchor. Or you can read this and begin asking questions about the choice of a vendor. OR you can admit you’re not a tooling or molding expert and in the interest of your own company, hire someone on a short term basis who is. In the long run you’ll save money. OR your can use this to scare the rats in the executive offices and go back to sleep.

It’s your choice.

This is the designer/consultant’s Full Employment Act.  No requirements about taking it under a 100 meters of water, but the product would be exposed to temperature, humidity, rain, snow, dirt, spiders etc.  It just sat there receiving phone calls from the lottery’s computer and telling the sign one hundred feet off the ground what numbers to display.

The first consideration is whether this seal has to be permanent or temporary.  Permanent means you put it together and it stays together.  Temporary means either a one time (disposable) use or something you could open and close to repair the inner workings.  In the closed position it had a seal.  Being able to open it might allow repairs.  Because of the internal snazziness of certain components it was two parts that needed to be attached together. There are all sorts of ways to do make it hermetic:

MECHANICAL BONDING
Screws/bolts – this is a great way to make a hermetic seal (that mandates a gasket of some kind along with the appropriate retaining grooves and some heavy algebra calculating the crush on the gasket as the piece is put together.  But it is component and labor intensive.

Snap-fit/crush pins through a gasket.  All the design complexity of the Screws/bolts idea without the screws and bolts.  These can be designed as ‘one way’ meaning if you want to disassemble it you need to break it, or the snaps can be designed to push out of the way so that you can separate the two parts.

CHEMICAL BONDING
Adhesives/solvent welding – good but time intensive and with the concern that the bleed over might mess up the internal components unless the design facilitates someplace for the bleed-over to go. These must be jigged (clamped) in position until whatever you are using as an adhesive has ‘set’.

THERMAL BONDING
Ultra sonic/vibration welding.  This is an excellent technology to make hermetic seals.  However the imparted vibrational energy is not particularly friendly to printed circuit boards or their components.  Since this is a melting technology you also need a place for the bleed-over to go unless it isn’t a cosmetic concern.

Electro-magnetic bonding.  Here we have a ‘gasket’ made from the material but heavily loaded with ferrite.  We put it near and intense alternating magnetic field, the particles vibrate to the point of melting the gasket and the parent material and Viola!  Hermetic seal. Cool!  Very controllable, the darling of the medical device folks because it’s clean.  However just like the vibration welding techniques, it is not particularly friendly to electronics.

Hot plate welding.  This very simply asks you to make to ‘ribs’ on your sealing surface proud.  You then make (have someone make) a contoured heated plate.  Both halves are jigged together and separated only enough to allow the heated plate in.  The parts are then put in contact with the heated plate until the ribs are melted.  The plate is quickly removed and the parts are pushed together.  Your design needs to allow for the bleed-over to go somewhere (usually this is a designed in groove on either side of the ribs OR you just let it smoosh on the inside and outside.  The key here is also the limit you need in any thermal welding.  You need to have the machine designed not only to provide pressure to hold the pieces together but it must also be mounted with stops so that the melt pool isn’t pushed away.

In all thermal bonding techniques it is equally important to get a good melt pool AND keep the parts positioned long enough for the melt to cool.

NOTES:  Mechanical bonding is only as strong as what is holding it together. Under vibration or thermal softening many mechanical techniques fail.  Remember that plastic creeps, you’ll either need to install metal ultra-sonic insets and use some kind of locking screw to keep the screw from backing out or the tri-lobal screws where the plastic will creep back around the screw holding it in place.

Chemical/Thermal bonding is usually considered a one-way assembly technique. To test the quality of the weld, break the unit apart at the welded/glued interface.  An adhesion bond is defined as being able to equally pull the parent material from each of the two halves when it is broken.  This therefore makes the quality of the weld a direct function of cleanliness.  Greasy fingers will leave an ‘interface’ layer where your ultra-sonic/thermal melt pool won’t directly adhere plastic to plastic.  This microscopic seam line will destroy the hermetic nature of the seal.

What did my client end up doing?  Actually kinda funny:  He put the electronics in one half of the plastic part then covered it in Urethane potting compound.  Once it had set up, he then solvent welded the two parts together.  Not only was it waterproof, it could probably survive being hit by a meteor!  I couldn’t convince him either would do the job unless there was a hidden agenda somewhere.  I will concede it passed environmental exposure, water immersion and heat soaking with flying colors.

I had another client who was molding a little ‘rat fink’ load cell in GF Nylon coupled with a micro radio transmitter.  This little one inch cube was fixed to the hub of the tire for a long-haul trailer.  This gizmo would tell whoever read the radio signal, how fast the trailer was going, how long it stopped, acceleration and deceleration.  What fascinated me on this project wasn’t that it was Big Brother looking over the trucker’s driving style, it was how to put a plastic/electronic product on the hub of a truck tire and have it survive the abuse those things see.

In both cases what was important wasn’t the attachment technique.  It was whether the gizmo would survive its use environment for whatever the manufacturer considered an acceptable lifespan (defined in years for the billboard computer and thousands of miles for the truck thingy).  Strong doesn’t mean tough.  Strong means durable or (dare we say it?) Fitness for use.

End use testing is the ‘D’ in R&D that most designers find boring because they are usually not very good at designing real world testing and properly interpreting the (statistical) results.  If you’re in that boat; your friendly community college, university or the American Society of Quality Control can dig up a Geek who can help your design the test and then tell you in small simple words what the results gave you.

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This article, like all the other ones, is virtual.  You can go to the Engineers and tell them they need a few more line items in their budget to verify their designs (remember FEA is supposed to be based on worst case tests, not theoretical assumptions).  Or you can go to the middle managers and marketeers who’ll tell you it will ruin their profit picture and product recalls are why the company has a legal department.  (you disloyal, nay-saying dummy!) OR you can step up to the plate and do something. OR….. You can read it, nod your head knowingly and feed the printout to the squirrels outside as insulation for the cold winter and go back to sleep.

Your choice.

Most designers, engineers, and tool makers use the “3-5 ton per exposed inch, clamp rule.” for a mold/machine fit.  ‘Thick’ materials with low melt indexes need only 3 tons/square inch of the surface area presented at the parting line to keep from flashing.  High melt index materials (‘thin’) are guestimated at 5 tons per square inch.  The beauty of this Rule of Thumb is that it’s polite enough not to describe the difference between low and high melt index, and with the extremely high melt index custom made materials (80+) the rule doesn’t really apply at all.

When you sit down in front a fireplace in the middle of cold winter’s eve drinking something flammable - old enough to be your uncle - and reflect on this rule; you finally get the punch line to this joke:  You can’t apply pressure to a hole.  So there’s either probably more to it, or you just got suckered into a Snipe Hunt and everyone will be laughing at you.  Yes?

Consider the above mentioned 500 ton press.  It should be capable of delivering 500 tons of force.  But when we’re holding a mold closed, we’re not interested in force, we’re interested in pressure.  Pressure is defined as force divided by area.

Thinking on this we take a short sip and visualize the mold. It is a four cavity hot runner eliminating the need to calculate clamp tonnage adding in the sprue and runner system.  Each cavity has worked out to 27 square inches (4” X 6.75”).  27 sq-inches per cavity times 4 tons/sq-inch times 4 cavities works out to 432 tons guestimated.  We consult the (I.A.I.M.) International Association of Injection Molders’ book Rules of Thumb, common sense, and sanity – what they didn’t teach you got your Plastics Degree in that snooty college (unpublished edition) and note for estimating purposes you should only use 85% of the press’s rated capacity. Our figure of 432 tons is a sconch (maybe a couple of sconches) above the 425 ton - 85% figure, but good enough for estimating!

The next step is the MMDTTWTE - Pronounced “Mmm-DEE-TWEET” from the I.A.I.M.’s (mind- mold-design-thoughts-thunk-whilst-thinking experiment).  We mentally lay the cavities out in a 2 X 2 fashion, giving us an 8” by 13.5” group.  We separate the cavity inserts with 2” of steel and get 10” by 15.5”.  We further allow for a 3” perimeter for the outside of the mold to accommodate leader pins and such giving us the minimum length and width of the mold as 16” by 21.5”.  As a last step we make two checks:

Question #1 Is there enough room between the tie rods on our 500 ton machine?
Answer #1 (in Swedish Minnesota-ese): Ah, You betcha’, by golly!

Question #2 What’s the nearest standard mold base that accommodates our 16” by 21.5”?
Answer #2: After a quick dumpster dive into the mold supplier’s internet catalog we come up with a base of 15.875” by 23.5” (close enough).  This works out to about 373 sq-in.  Now the only exercise left is the thickness of the plates, the hot runner system, the ejector box and other silliness.

Just to backstop our MMDTTWTE, we quickly go to the section in the I.A.I.M.’s book under the “Tribal Knowledge of shot sizes” and see if our 500 ton machine’s shot capacity (which has the bad taste to be rated in ounces or grams of Polystyrene) can handle the shot size of our mental mold and land between rule of thumb 20-80% of the press’s shot capacity.  With a little more algebraic gymnastics calculating the ratio of the specific gravity of Polystyrene and our chosen material we happily find out (give or take a few percentage points) the shot size is in the mid 50% range.  The Tribal Knowledge ‘Shalt Nots’ (also know as the “Shants”) chapter proscribe that the shot size ‘shant be below 20% nor above 80% of the machine’s capacity’ – Amen).  All is well and good from a shot size standpoint; so we can continue our cogitation on clamp pressures.

Since we’re on our third glass of 200 octane refreshment, we won’t digress to consider the movement of side actions that will require both their thickness plus an inch of steel added to our perimeter or internal spacing calculations depending on where they reside.

Putting another log on our fire, let’s back-calculate the tons/sq-inch. 425 tons (85% of 500) divided by the sq-inches of the mold plate minus the leader pins’ surface area and the mold cavities.  What do we come up with?   425 tons clamping force divided by 373 sq-in (the mold base) minus 115 sq-in (four 1.5” diameter leader pins = 7 sq-in plus 4 times 27 sq-inches per cavity) works out to 1.65 tons/sq-inch.

Odd, this isn’t even close to our original Rule of Thumb of 4 tons/sq-inch.  “Whazup with that?” you might say. Actually two things come to mind:

Thing one – it was an excellent excuse for the consumption of 20 year old cough medicine and an interesting waste of algebra – the two numbers (calculated Tons/sq-inch v. Rule of thumb) don’t line up.

Thing two – it does say you have room to correct this situation.

If we simply stopped here, there’s a reasonable bet the press at full clamp still wouldn’t be able to keep the mold from flashing.  You can’t change the ‘tons’ side of the tons/square inch calculation unless you go to a bigger, more expensive machine; but you can certainly change the square inch side.

Our ‘Whazup” calculation gave us 425 tons divided by 258 square inches.  So, let’s preload the cavities.

In our mind we clear away steel on the mold base to a depth of about 0.100 inch leaving a perimeter around each insert of about a half inch wide alone.  We also take a portion around the leader pins, let’s say 3 X 3 inches, and cut away to only a depth of .002 inches.  Now as the mold closes the first ‘kiss’ – our preload - on the perimeter around each cavity.  Without getting all fancy-shmancy over the accuracy, it works out to about 43+ sq-inches of steel the machine will clamp on.  425 tons divided by 43 sq-inches is almost 10 tons per sq-inch!  WHOOPIE! More than enough!

As the press continues to close the second kiss will hit the area around the leader pins (we’ll call these standoff pads) and the mold will clamp up completely square.  Now our biggest problem will be to turn down the clamp pressure until we find that happy medium of keeping it from flashing and not crushing the vents.

Before we drift off to sleep after a tiring evening of calculations we can now be assured we need less than the maximum tonnage of the machine to keep the mold from flashing.  Even better, assuming the other pesky factors of residence time, shot capacity, and shot inventory aren’t in violation of the other Rules of Thumb, we can also run the mold in perhaps a smaller machine so long as we can get it between the tie rods.

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As a young pup, I was taken on hunting trips.  My main purpose was to get fire wood, haul water, keep the beer cold, listen and learn from the one-that-got-away stories.  However the Big Rule of hunting learned on these trips was always to “have enough gun.”  Shooting rabbits with a .22 is fine; but use that little plinker rifle on a 2,000 pound Grizzly Bear would probably result making one of you really cranky.  Conversely shooting a rabbit with a bear rifle would leave little for the evening’s stew.

Moral – use the right sized tool properly for the job at hand that will give you the maximum amount of practical flexibility.  With our mold, doing the preload thing gives us more presses to run in than simply trying to stomp the thing closed.

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This article is virtual.  I.A.I.M. is also a virtual International brotherhood composed of those of us who are in the molding industry, with occasional grease under the fingernails.  It has no dues, no membership roster, no formal meetings or conventions, and no secret handshake; although we are quite vocal in the occasional chat room.  It isn’t listed anywhere (the initials are, but citing many different affiliations).  The ‘fore mentioned handbook is virtual and unpublished.  While the rules of thumb are valid and proven; they are generally not consolidated in written format.  But it is fun to dream.

You can read this, call yourself a “Sustaining 4th Degree Mentor” of the Association and both use the information and pass it along to others referring to yourself as the Meister of Molding. As a final note, keeping with the high and lofty rules of the Association, it would be in poor taste to cobble together an invoice for annual membership dues and present it to middle management.  Nor, should you expect the folks with the mahogany desks to pay for the annual convention expenses or other technical meetings in Maui, Monte Carlo, or Melbourne.  It is not polite to fool the front office feeble minded.

You can read this, think it is all a long joke with no punch line and continue to squash your molds trying to get rid a flash.  Or, you can use what you’ve learned. Or, you can patiently try to convince the Bubba’s of the world that there is logic and proportion in the molding process.  OR, having stayed awake long enough to read this article word for word, you can enjoy the giggle and go back to sleep at your desk.

Your choice.

Most customers work on the assumption that their job at the supplier’s is the most important one in the world.  Ideally customers want perfect parts at unreasonably low prices with the supplier maintaining a high level of finished goods inventory that the customer is not held liable to purchase.  But in the real world quality is only ‘sufficient’.  Unless there is a specific clause in the purchase order the molder keeps a minimum of authorized inventory because this is only a bet (not a guarantee) that the customer will purchase it.

The problem here is the conflict between a reasonable request, profit, and how to ‘service’ a customer.

Let’s look at some examples:  The molder has quoted parts at $/1000 pieces based on a pre-negotiated retained in-house finished goods inventory that is built up to some maximum level and shipments are made until it reaches some minimum that triggers a rebuild.

Scenario #1 – The BIG order: a huge order arrives at the customer.  He calls his supplier’s customer service and orders (for immediate shipment) more parts than are in the retained furnished goods inventory. He wants the parts ASAP and not a split shipment with some being shipped immediately and the balance shipped when the job can be scheduled into production.

The expectation: The customer expects a Heaven and Earth move from the molder to juggle schedules, expedite production, and meet his requirements (all this at no increased in cost).

What happens: Unfortunately Customer Service usually complies.  The net result being a thoroughly scrambled production schedule, parts produced on an overtime basis with no profit to show for it.

What should happen: The entire retained inventory will be shipped at the negotiated pricing.  However the balance will be produced (if possible) and shipped at an expedited cost if it is truly needed ASAP or shipped at the original pricing when it comes out as a scheduled production run.  It’s the customer’s choice.
Scenario #2 The KanBan revision The negotiated price was in $/1000 in boxes of 250 units/box.  The customer wants to implement a better KanBan :program and wants 750 parts shipped every other day.

The expectation Since this all works out to a $/1000 deal anyway, there should be no increase in pricing.

What happens Usually there is no increase in the costing.

What should happen Each shipment requires paperwork.  It doesn’t matter if it is one part or a million; the administrative costs are the same to generate the shipper, the invoice as well as the record keeping for each shipment.  Also, the deal was $/1000 pieces not fractional $/1000 pieces.  A request like this scrambles the lot shipping system for the molder.  In this light the cost should be renegotiated to accommodate both the split shipment mentality and the increased administrative costs.

Scenario #3  The work balancing revision: Some bookie at the customer decided under his KanBan analysis it would be better if they ordered and received products in unit measures of 100 and not 250 pieces per box.

The expectation Parts is parts! It shouldn’t make no difference no-how!
What happens:  Usually the request is sent to the warehouse where they break open the packaging, re-package in the desired amount and new jobs are put into different sized boxes.

What should happen: Boxes/containers aren’t cheap.  Cutting the part count down increases the cost per part per box.  It also scrambles the boxes per skid count, the stack pattern on a skid, and how the parts are stored in the warehouse.  Not to mention the boxes (you buy by the bundle of 25 or 50) that you no longer have any use for and the new boxes you’ll have to order.  This also accompanies the mess that has been caused in the production control system whose unit count of final inventory is boxes and not pieces.  A simple request like this has a major administrative cost as well as an ongoing cost-of-packaging cost.

Scenario #4  The ‘Obsolete’ part trick: An engineering change is processed, invalidating all the parts in the JIT warehouse inventory.

The expectation: Since the parts were never truly ordered, the customer isn’t liable to pay for them.  They should be scrapped and replaced.

What happens: Usually the request is honored with a little screaming and whining. If whining doesn’t work it is a common trick for the customer to pull a ‘quality audit’ and scrap everything on the grounds of poor quality.

What should happen: Somebody didn’t do their homework.  In the initial agreement this should have been anticipated so that if the standing unpurchased inventory is declared invalid because of a customer caused engineering change, the molder will be compensated for his loss.

Scenario #5  Busting your chops:
5.1 Customer service is called into the customer for a meeting to ‘review all the pricing’ in anticipation of renewing the next year’s master purchase orders.
5.2 Customer service is called into for a face-to-face meeting to explain the cost increases due to resin prices
5.3 Customer service is called into for a face-to-face meeting for an ‘annual performance review’ or to receive (have inflicted on them) a ‘cost reduction’ program.

The expectation: The customer expects Customer Service to drop everything, pack up a toothbrush etc. and hop on an airplane at a moment’s notice to attend a meeting and ‘explain their actions.

What happens: In most cases the expectation is not only met, but the customer service folks take the buyer and anyone else within hearing distance out to dinner!

What should happen.
5.1  There is NO REVIEW of pricing.  You were the low bidder those are your current (non-negotiable) prices. If you are going to be cross-quoted it will happen whether you show up or not.
5.2  Resin price increases are pass-through costs.  The pricing on materials is public data found in trade magazines or on the Internet.  Since the customer specified the material, if anybody is going to negotiate a new price it should be them, not you.
5.3  Performance reviews can be mailed.  If it’s poor you can’t explain their data any differently regardless of the truth.  Having a TASK or COST REDUCTION program shoved down your throat without the customer funding the productivity improvements is arrogant and shows poor manners and a bad upbringing on their part.

All of these actions are merely a rookie-sandbox-power-game to see if you’ll spend your money and time to ‘dance to his tune’.  Do you do these things to your local grocer, the owner of your favorite restaurant; the phone/utility company or the credit card companies?  If you did, you’d be less than politely asked to no longer to do business with them, and laughed out of their offices.

Customer service is a profession like anything else.  Its purpose on the supplier’s side of the equation is to be the interface between the customer and the suppliers, to ‘play’ according to a set of pre-agreed rules and make sure things go smoothly.  Any time the customer changes the rules, he cannot selectively change one side of this equation without the consequence of having the other side change to balance it.

Customer Service is not in the business of Freebies.  Both the customer and supplier have to set a system in place that is flexible enough to adapt to the inevitable changes that are market driven.  If they don’t, it must be understood that everything has to be renegotiated on a case by case basis.

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This article is virtual. You can read it and stop doing some very expensive money losing favors asked by your customer.  Or you can read it and ‘soldier on’ continuing to be your customer’s lap dog.  OR you can send it up the food chain to management with a few notes penciled in the margins on how much each of these stunts is costing you and hope the Ivory Tower Troops will have a quiet chat with the customer’s director of purchasing.  If the quite chat doesn’t work, they might instruct Customer Service to say “NO!” like a parent would do to a petulant child and back them up when the customer complains.  OR you can read it, figure you can’t do anything about it, shred it and use the shavings to line the cages of the Office Gerbils (middle management).

Your choice.

I keep hearing the horror stories:  “We tried to bring the mold back into the country but the guy wants $XXX,XXX in Engineering Services Fees before he’ll release the tooling!”  Welcome to the real world!  Here’s what’s happening.  You’re pulling the job and the offshore molder is going to be losing profit he’d make if he kept it.  He’s across several time zones, international borders, and legal systems.  Here in the USA you only have to pay up all outstanding invoices and whatever charges you agreed to in your policy manual having to do with raw materials and such.  Once you’ve settled your account if you don’t get your mold, you go to court and things get nasty very quickly for your supplier.  If you try the same stunt with a Chinese molder, they’ll just laugh at you.  While you have recourse to go through the Chinese Court system, don’t hold your breath.  The game’s rigged for the home team.  You’re not the home team. Get it?

Scenario #1. Let’s say you do get the mold and you ship it to your best bud that you’ve not been allowing to quote because you sent everything across the pond.  Here’s your challenge:

Whose quality standards are we using?  If you expect the guy in the Windy City to produce the crown jewels from a mold that was lucky to make parts that even looked like what you’d specified; you’re in for a disappointment.

Expect any competent molder to take the mold as he would any other mold that just showed up on his dock.  In his view it’s nothing more than a pile of metal plates (maybe not even tool steel) until proven otherwise.

Expect to pay for an evaluation run.  This will show everyone what the mold is capable of producing, warts and all.

Expect a lengthy laundry list of repairs, replacements and refurbishments that will have to be done and paid for before this mold is put into production.  Keep in mind your buyer giggled with delight when the mold’s original cost was 1/3 the stateside cost.  The reason for this low cost was cheap labor and inexpensive (read different quality) materials.  In low labor markets they have no expectation of a mold lasting 1,000,000 cycles with its original components.  Because labor is so cheap, it’s more economical to continually rebuild components that wear out.  I’ve seen a few jobs that by the time the insourced mold was producing quality parts, the mold base was the only thing salvageable: all the inserts, mechanisms and pins were replaced.  Ouch! Spendy.

You might also brace yourself for the “There’s nothing salvageable in this tool” speech.  What you’re being told is that if the molder could pay his people $2/day it would be economical to hire an army of convicts to deflash every part and he’d be able to run the volumes you need.  But in the USA, it’s probably cheaper overall to simply build a new mold and get on with life.  Remember the buyer saying “I can by three molds in China for the price of one mold in the USA!”?  Now’s the time to cash in that boast.

SCENARIO #2
Regardless of whether you can directly produce acceptable parts from your ‘insourced’ mold, refurbish the mold, or replace it entirely; you’re faced with two problems.  How do I (1) track the repairs/refurbishment?  And (2) how do I requalify the parts/molds?

This is a big albeit short term, engineering commitment that neither the customer nor the molder can staff because the problem is a short term one.  Who are you going to find who’ll do this besides their normal responsibilities?  If you think the molder has tooling engineers loafing around, he doesn’t. He downsized his staff when you downsized him.  If you think you can talk your people into working double duty (read 60-hour weeks) under the clause ‘any other duties management shall assign’ in your in-house people’s employment agreement; they’ll probably quit, or be divorced after the first month of this kind of panic.

What do you do?  Actually it’s simple.  This is what I do.  I’m experienced, don’t mind long hours, and short term (you don’t have to fire me, I just go home when the job is done). You hire me, or another consultant.  Tooling is rebuilt and reported to you on a weekly basis, qualifications are run and certified and you’re back in business as quickly as feasibly possible.  I’m not in love with traveling.  I extensively use the Internet for progress reporting (electronic spreadsheets complete with graphs), digital photographs to show the physical progress, and free video conferencing which is cheap. A one hour teleconference, is hundreds (sometimes thousands) of times cheaper than the time and billable hours for a road trip. Even a middle manager can figure that out!

Yup, it will cost you.  Or, you can do what you did with the Chinese mold-builder/molder: make one phone call, send off a check, go to sleep, and begin yelling for finished parts when the guy said he’d be done.  Oh Wait! You can’t do that! You’re already in production. Now what?

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You can read this and think it’s nothing less than Shameless Marketing on my part. You’re probably be right.  Or, you can read this and at least not get bushwhacked when a few dozen tools have to be relocated; not knowing the kind of commitment it will take to find new homes for all of them and fill the supply chain back up.  Or you can naively think your people will gladly jump to the task and ‘be happy in their work’ – you only have a few weeks of that silliness before burnout sets in.  OR you can just go back to sleep and wait for the dreaded ‘relocation memo’ to whack you on the nose.

I could use the work and you need to keep your job and your people.

Your choice.

Try these tips

- Start and finish the meeting on time. If there’s more to consider, plan the appropriate follow-up actions or schedule another meeting.
HINT ON PROMPTNESS Shut the door at the start of the meeting.  Lock the door and don’t answer the knocking if you want some fun.  Or if anyone (managers included) come in late, everyone stands up and applauds them for taking time out of their busy day to come to the meeting.

- At the close of the meeting, ask if participants are comfortable with the outcomes.
HINT ON OUTCOMES – business isn’t a democracy, but it also isn’t a dictatorship.  Make sure the assigned work is evenly distributed so that no one is overloaded and no slackers can point to someone else.

- Make sure all meeting participants know that you expect them to be on time and prepared to discuss their agenda items.
HINT ON DISCUSSIONS:  While a little brutal make a ground rule that anyone who comments off topic, isn’t prepared, or disrupts the meeting will be told to leave and must make up his/her assignment without further participation.

- Encourage everyone to speak up. Quieter people may have valuable contributions, but they may need some encouragement to share them.
HINTS ON PARTICIPATION: Everyone has something to contribute.  Make the ground rules clear that if someone sees a flaw in the plan should speak up, not criticizing but offering an alternative.  Ten people will have ten different points of view.  All of them are usually valid.

- Provide a detailed agenda for each meeting. It should include topics for and the purpose of discussion, as well as a discussion leader and time allotment for each topic. Distribute the agenda a couple of days before the meeting so that meeting participants have time to prepare.
HINTS ON MEETING AGENDAS – meetings are for problem solving, information exchange and consensus building.  Focus on the agenda.  If someone wants to preach point them to their local church.

- Assign someone to take notes in each meeting. That way, decisions and follow-up action items are documented and can be circulated to the meeting’s participants.  NOTES – there are computer programs that can record meetings and transcribe them into notes.  You don’t need a verbatim transcript.  Meetings are not a trial or deposition.  Highlight the bullet points, who is responsible for the actions and when they will deliver.  Three columns on a sheet of paper #1 Action Item, #2 Who’s going to handle it #3 the expected outcome (both action and completion dates).

- Determine which meetings are really necessary. If the objective of a meeting is to simply update others about ongoing projects, it might make more sense to send a memo or group e-mail, or to post the information on your company’s computer network. However, for in-depth discussions, meetings generally work best.
IMPORTANCE OF MEETINGS – While many people believe in weekly meetings and the importance of ‘Face Time’, meetings are expensive.  If you divide company profits by headcount you’ll quickly see each person at a meeting costs (or should be generating) $100+/hour.  A one hour meeting costs someone between $500 and $1000 worth of profit.  Think about the ROI and balance that against an e-mail before you schedule the meeting.

PRESENTATIONS
More and more, PowerPoint presentations are common in meetings.  Here are some hints:

-Graphics – Slides should be highlighting talking points.  Hard copy handouts are better to looking at data.  Use your slides to advance your meeting’s agenda. Don’t read the slide out loud.  This isn’t story time at nursery school.  The slide should either prompt your speech or be self explanatory.  Nothing else.

-Readability  - the rule of thumb for slides is that if the whole slide can’t be read in less than 5 seconds, you should use more slides.

-Data Overload – the slide should be in 24 point Font or larger.  Turning a spreadsheet into a slide will only allow the people next to the screen to read it.  If this kind of data is necessary, use a handout.  Small front is unreadable and irritating.

-Humor – don’t use cute pictures, cartoons etc. to keep people’s attention.  If you feel you need to, you don’t have anything to present. Pictures should illustrate something.  Use the rule of readability when using pictures.

-Animations etc. – It is very easy to animate slides but it is also very irritating to see your talking point’s flying all over the slide until they come to rest in their designated slot.  Keep animation simple and to a minimum.

-Handouts.  Using slides as handouts only shows the presenter isn’t prepared. Even worse 24 Point font on a slide reduces to less than telephone book font on paper and is difficult/impossible to read.  Handouts should be text, tables, photos and such as something to discuss.  Keep in mind, if you give someone a handout, they’ll read it and not pay attention to your slides.

-FORMAT – Your first slide to be a graphic ‘table of contents’ for the rest of your slides telling the audience what they are going to see later in the presentation.  Some companies insist all slides carry the company logo.  While completely political do what’s right.  Each presentation should have four parts: 1. Tell them what you are going to tell them.  2. Tell them.  3. Tell them what you told them.  4. Allow them to ask questions about what you told them.

-THEATER – a PowerPoint presentation is a kind of theatrical performance.
1. Rehearse what you are going to say in front of somebody.  Do it until they understand what you’re saying.  If they don’t understand, redo the slides.  Simple is better than confusing.
-You should control the presentation not it controlling you.  Know what you are saying so well that you don’t even have to use the slides to prompt you.

2. People cannot take notes in the dark.  The only way you can see a slide with a dark background is in a completely blackened room and bright colored text.  If you ABSOLUTELY need a background color use a light one where black colored letters are easily readable.  If not, use a clear background and dim the room, don’t turn off all the lights.

3.  Use larger font for important headings and smaller fonts for subheadings.  Keep the font simple – Ariel, Times New Roman or Veranda.  Fancy fonts might look good on billboards or award diplomas but are impossible to read during a presentation.

4. Questions – questions during your presentation can quickly sidetrack the topic.  Hold off questions until the end of the presentation.  Allow 25% of your scheduled time for questions.

5. Grammar and spelling – PowerPoint has a spell checker, Use it.  Many managers will ask for a copy of your presentation (for their use in later meetings).  Each memo, report, and presentation is really a job performance review.  If your grammar looks like it was learned at the Prison Work Release program, that’s how you’ll be judged.

6. LAST SLIDE – nothing makes you look more like a rookie than at the end of the presentation everyone is staring at a black screen with ‘end of presentation’ in white letter staring at them.  You last slide should either solicit questions and comments.

Meetings / Presentations are taking on more and more of a theatrical flavor.  None of the rules are complex or hard to master but it does take a skill you probably didn’t learn in school.  Unfortunately more meetings/projects succeed on their theatrical content than they do on their substance.  Such is the Computer Age.

More bad ideas have been accepted and good ideas ignored because of the quality of the presentation.  Looking ill prepared or like an amateur trying to put on a presentation will cause your contribution to be ignored only a little slower than not presenting it at all.  Like everything else it is all about preparation and rehearsal.

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If you’d like to see how to make a mess out of your presentations check out this YouTube presentation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDRTFvQFJNo&feature=channel

This article is Virtual.  You can read this, take a little time to minimally master the skills and your meetings will go smoother and presentations be accepted with a higher percentage than before.  Or you can think by sheer force of personality you can get your ideas across and you’ll have your head handed to you by a rookie who can present better than you.  OR you can read this, think you know it all, use it to scare the vultures flying around the plant, and wonder why nobody listens to you.

The choice is yours, grasshopper.

When looking at this bundle of quotes think about what will happen:
1.    What would you do if you get all of them?
2.    Do you have the machine capacity to accommodate perhaps half of the ones you quoted?
3.    What is the level of expertise that your folks can bring to this particular party? Have you ever run PolyWhatDoYouCallIt- Engineering grade?
4.    And . .  Can you afford (finance) it?
Have you adequately trained the setup techs so that qualifying and documenting a new mold can be done in such a manner so that they don’t ‘start from scratch’ the next time this mold is run?  The more jobs you add to your inventory the less time the setup team is going to have to bring everything on line. Training and record keeping is paramount.
What about quality?  Customer Service/production control are in a rush to make the shipments.  When in doubt, the quality people will inevitably err on the side of the ‘perfect part’ rather than let a minor flaw get through for fear of the shipment getting rejected.  Production only wants to do a good job and would rather not fight with quality or play hide-and-seek with the shift’s production until a more lenient inspector looks at the part.

Has the customer adequately defined the Acceptable Part so that everyone in production, quality, and customer service are all in tune with each other?  The worst part of a new job is that everyone has a different opinion of “Acceptable”.

While an esoteric calculation; has anybody done a Machine Load calculation?  If the new jobs you are quoting are all going to go into machines between 125T and 250T, do you have available capacity to run them?  The big error in machine load calculations is that they look at open machine time compared to the capacity used up running the new jobs.  The problem here is allowing for mold changeovers, yield rates, machine maintenance and such.  The injection molding process runs best on a 24/7 basis.  But if this means putting on extra people, running on the weekends, or restructuring to a 4 shift, 7 day week production schedule; even if you have the machine time available, you have to attend to more people and more infrastructure (supervision and all the support people) along with the new jobs.  In many cases this is done using the Keystone-Cops-Mentality:  Ready, Fire, Aim!  In practical terms this means people bid the job, hope for the best, then scramble to deal with the outcome.  A little analysis and contingency planning is always good.

Another factor with the Keystone-Cops-Mentality is money.  Let’s say you got the job – 10 multi cavity tools.  You’ve managed to get the tooling built and qualified with the customer’s money being only involved with ‘Engineering Services’ to make sure the tools were built for your operation.  Now production begins.  Looking at the times for shipping, material usage, filling your customer’s order schedule etc., your initial purchase looks like 15 gaylords of molding compound.  Since plastic generically tends to cost more than a dollar a pound, do you have $15,000+ either on hand or in your line of credit?  Since you won’t be converting it all back into cash immediately from your shipments, do you have an additional amount of funding to make your next order?  The resin companies usually require N-30.  A simple look at the timeline will show you if your customer pays on the same terms, even with KanBan shipments, you probably won’t pay for those 15 gaylords in less than N-60.  What’s your plan?

Growth is desirable in our business.  But growth should be managed. Slowly.  You need to build your business base AND your work force competency together.  Bring in new business to an ill trained or new a bunch of new employees on a technology basis alone is a formula for disaster.

Juggling money is even worse: A notorious business practice from the Big Discount retailers is to overwhelm a supplier with orders he can’t finance.  Then they come to the molder and offer to lend him money to service the orders (either directly or they through the back door underwriting the bank loan on their terms).  What the molder doesn’t read is the fine print – the late penalty payments are close to loan sharking, in many cases the molder unknowingly is putting up the equity in his company as collateral for the loan.  With one big reject, or a stall in payments all of a sudden the molder defaults on a payment and customer owns the company. (Visions of the Mafia Don saying “nothing personal. It’s just business” Yes?). If the customer underwrote the loans from the bank, they merely show up at the auction as the lien holder in first position. Mr. Big Discount takes his product to one of his in-house manufacturing sites, pillages and plunders the assets, and sells off the business.  He ended up owning a multi-million dollar business for less than a few hundred thousand dollars.  The molder is lucky to be left with his house and his marriage.  AND, believe it or not, the Big Discount folks showed a huge profit from this game,  all because a molder couldn’t manage the financial side of growth.
The plastics business isn’t about plastics.  It’s about money first, planning second, and expertise as a close third.  If you don’t have an excellent financial plan, business plan, and a solid workforce; a large order will kill you quicker than your customers pulling their work.
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This article is Virtual.  You can ready this, look at the new business coming in and think you can ‘out play’ the people you’re doing business with.  (You can’t).  Or you can read this and do a little investigating to see what you can manage and then take in new business or turn it down as your plan dictates.  (Do this and you’ll be a success). OR you can just quote everything that comes across your desk, take the jobs you’re awarded and be a Keystone Cop.  (The odds of your winning is roughly equal to breaking the bank at Black Jack in Las Vegas.)
I just point out the mud puddles; I can’t stop you from walking in them.
Your choice.

There are distinctly different philosophies for the Buyer-Engineer Team when it comes to a tool build project.  Each philosophy seems to have evolved as a company has grown. They all have their own pitfalls, so the choice is yours.

Philosophy #1 – The “Don’t Worry, Be Happy!” Scenario
In this scenario the tooling engineer either doesn’t exist or the buyer takes over the role.  Since this isn’t a ‘sexy’ buy, such as spendy electronics or precious metal purchases, it is relegated to Joey, the New Kid in purchasing who isn’t expected to have much expertise in anything.  The mentality here is that the purchased parts cost pennies, thus putting them into the realm of a Commodity Purchase (along with pencils, toilet paper, boxes and cleaning supplies). Joey sends out a RFQ that looks like a bad joke – “Design and build a Class A tool to produce part XY92 per the attached design in volumes of 500,000 parts per year. The parts are to be of a high polish. Quote timing and delivery of mold and production of parts.”  He sends of two quotes to vendors who have produced parts for this company in the recent past and one to a Chinese company he saw in a trade magazine ad.

The first local molder mails in his quote along with a three page list of design corrections to the part.  It confuses Joey and he ignores it. The second molder’s sales rep shows up personally, dropping off the SPI mold standards on a slightly confused Joey and then takes the designer out to lunch to discuss (among other things) changes to the design to make it more manufacturable.  The Chinese molder e-mails in a tooling quote about a third of the cost of the two US vendors and a part price if the buyer would have taken the time to analyze it; that was 1% above the raw resin cost.

Joey takes two minutes to carefully analyze the total cost of the bids, weighing the risks of going to an unknown supplier, the problems with a long supply chain etc. and places the job with the Chinese molder (because his bid is cheap) anyway.  He makes a note on his calendar on the tool delivery, sends off the down payment and the PO, and goes back to sleep.

One week before the tool was scheduled to be tried out, he starts calling over to China wondering what happened to his tool, when the tryout will be and when he can receive parts for evaluation.  When the sample parts arrive, they are the wrong polish, the wrong dimensions and a few other problems.  Within a few weeks (regardless of whatever time table was originally agreed to) marketing is so hungry it deviates it’s expectations and the buyer tosses the project ‘over the wall’ being quite happy with the money he saved his company by avoiding any engineering services expense.  Since expediting costs, freight costs, quality costs, mold maintenance costs and all the other incidental costs are someone else’s budget  (as the philosophy implies) he isn’t worried and is happy.  All the problems/costs can be neatly laid to rest at the feet of someone else.

This philosophy sees its best success when tooling is built for simple, low tolerance parts that for some reason can’t be purchased out of a catalog.  It is also quite successful in companies who have raised office politics, back stabbing, and blame laying to an art form.

Philosophy #2 – The “Micro Project Management (/party) ” Scenario
In this scenario the Buyer plays the role of paper pusher.  The tooling Engineer ‘chases’ the tooling.  The RFQ goes out as above but is also accompanied by a set of tooling standards.  The choice of vendor is determined by any number of methods.

When the job is about ready to be placed the tooling engineer quietly shouts “Road Trip!!!!” He does fast research on five star hotels and one star off hours entertainment possibilities and the games begin.  Joey doesn’t even have to mail the PO and the check.  The tooling engineer is on the doorstep of molder’s facility with the down payment and the PO.  His first visit is billed as a ‘get acquainted’ visit.  This visit should accomplish a mutual understanding of the tooling specifications, the ‘details’ of the part designs and clear up any misunderstandings on how the tooling is to be built.

The engineer doesn’t simply go back to his office and is ‘available’ to answer questions.  He shows up on a weekly or bi-monthly basis having also taken the above mentioned sidetrips - in the winter he goes to the tool shop on friday and unfortunately get’s stranded for the weekend on a ‘nearby’ ski resort in the Rocky Mountains, Baja Salt Lake, or any one of the areas in the Adrondacks. On Monday afternoon, he tells the mold builder how to build the mold, how to run his shop, what machines should be doing what tasks, and routinely asks for numerous ‘freebies’ as the project progresses.  He also shows up for that embarrassing first tryout whose only purpose is to see if you can squirt plastic into all the cavities.  He’s there for every other additional tryout as minor tooling glitches are corrected and finally there for the Qualification Run.

He’s full of ‘Shoulda’, ‘Woulda’, Coulda’ criticisms.  He’s also big on war stories from ‘the good old days when (I was a toolmaker, ran a tool shop, owned a molding company)’ and remarkably short on productive, helpful advice that wasn’t asked for anyway.  <<As an aside, if he actually was a successful mold maker, tool shop supervisor or molding company owner; why is he now a tooling engineer?>> Instead of good project engineering assistance; it would appear the tooling engineer was making a concerted effort to qualify for the Million Mile Air Travel award and Free Hotel Nights to finance his next vacation in Maui on his employer’s expense account.

Once the part is approved (the above mentioned ‘over the wall’ trick), the engineer is too busy with new projects to put in any more time assisting in the problems of on-going production from his prior projects.

The cost of travel, hotels, rental cars, lost work time, meals etc.  turned out to be the equivalent of the cost of supporting another experienced engineer ($90-110,000/year + Overhead and benefits pro rated over the life of the tool build).  But since this is a budgeted overhead cost, nobody looks at it.

This philosophy (without the engineer) tends to be considered a company perk for middle management. It is a combination of ‘fact finding (?)’ and management nagging coupled with going to exotic places and the other benefits (?) of traveling.  Even with the engineer, the time and expense required for this entertainment, only succeeds in irritating the supplier.

Scenario #3 The “Strictly business” Scenario
As in Scenario #2 the Buyer mainly plays the role of money manager.  The tooling Engineer ‘chases’ the tooling.  The RFQ goes out as above but is also accompanied by a set of tooling standards.   Here we have the “Buyer-Engineer Team”.  Joey and the Engineer huddle together analyzing the quotes and look for the lowest TOTAL cost, not just the tooling and part cost but also all the other secondary costs incurred putting good product in the hands of the production people.  Based on this decision, the job is placed.

The Joey calls up the molding house and indicates the engineer will be coming out to set up the program.  The engineer shows up but rather than let’s-tour-the-shop-and–go–to-lunch-at-some-naughty-club piece of street theater a`la scenario #2, he explains how his involvement with the tooling program will proceed:

1.    If everything goes according to plan the engineer will only show up again to attend the qualification run.  If there are engineering changes that will affect the program that need explanations and negotiations both the buyer and engineer will show up and settle the issues on the spot.  If they can be done with a few conference calls; that will be the preferred method.

2. The Engineer goes over the tool specifications noting the particular points that apply to this specific job.

3. The Engineer provides a list of component suppliers as part of the tooling specifications.  Purchasing of mold bases/components will not be done until a preliminary mold design is received and approved by the engineer complete with a materials list. The tool builder is to send a copy of the purchase order for all components to the buyer.  This is done to make sure the molder is buying from the approved vendors.

4. The raw data for a weekly progress report is to be e-mailed to the tooling engineer.  This is done by breaking down each operation of the mold build into hours and then calculating the percentage of each.  Every week the mold builder simply looks at the percent complete of each operation.  Multiplying these two numbers together and then adding them all up will give a percentage completion for the overall mold.  The engineer simply pastes this column of information into his program and then distributes it within his company along with a brief report. On occasion the tooling engineer will ask for and the mold builder will supply digital photographs/videos of the various components.  This will verify the work done.

5. If the progress reports show the program to be on time, there is no need for any visits or communication until the qualification run.  If the project shows signs of being late that cannot be corrected, the engineer will literally baby sit the project at the mold maker’s facility until it is.

6. Face to Face conversations are to be video conferences preferably over SKYPE or in an AOL/Yahoo chat room.  Travel is authorized only when all other means of communication cannot accomplish the task.

7. Engineering changes cannot stall the program.  If they come up, Joey and the Engineer go to the mold builders where the engineer discusses the impact of timing on the program and the cost of the change.  Joey (who is the only one empowered to actually authorize the change) signs the paperwork to make it happen on the spot.

Although there is a lot of keyboard thumping and telephone calls, the buyer-engineer team actually have the time to handle the building of several molds at different vendors as well as the care and feeding of production’s needs with a minimum of travel.  In this manner the Engineer does Engineering Stuff, and Joey does Purchasing Stuff.  They work together as a team instead of the Engineer playing buyer than forcing Joey to do the follow up paperwork.

Yes, the buyer engineer team is completely Project Focused and work together for its success.

No, there aren’t any unproductive road trip junkets, especially by managers.

Yes, the buyer engineer team passed the mold progress reports up the food chain for management’s information and back to the tool shop in a timely manner.

Yes, they both followed through when the product went into production.

No, there were no ‘Perks’; only professionalism.

This philosophy works best when you are betting the profits of your company.  Its premise is competent people, good communication, professionalism and a well calibrated BS meter to avoid the silliness of unnecessary reports, meetings and trips.  It feeds management’s obsession for data collection.  With a little work on the spreadsheets; the data can be converted into charts and graphs (Executive Coloring books) for managers to show each other during the monthly One Upmanship PowerPoint presentations.

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Philosophy #1 is cheap, easy, monotonously naive and full of pitfalls.  This philosophy is the main reason for the many horror stories from the placement of tools Off Shore.

Philosophy #2 has the appearance of being productive rather than the quality of the work done. The philosophy is quite common when one engineer has anointed himself as the ‘Guru’ of Tooling’ and nobody has the guts to challenge his methods. This philosophy can usually be flushed out if the tooling engineer almost always is chatting up “We can get great tooling in Auckland New Zealand, West Berlin Germany, or Grenobel France” but never mentions Chicago or Toledo when the next project comes up.

Philosophy #3 is business – If the project needs attention; it gets it.  If the mold builder is a pro, he’s left to do mold builder stuff without being bothered.  If he’s a screw-up, the engineer and sometimes the buyer is all over him like a bad rash.  This philosophy works in companies where people want to see the company/project succeed.

Which philosophy would you want to build your tools under?

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This article is virtual.  You can read this, take a squinty eyed look at the tool procurement process in your company and measure it against the three philosophies.  If you don’t like what you see; change it.  Or, you can use this to rat out the slackers and travel junket managers to upper management. OR you can let the sleeping dogs lie and donate the article’s printout to the local landfill, hoping the travel budget doesn’t eat up the bonus you think you’ll get.

Your choice.

Around 1778, Honore` Blanc a French gunsmith, began producing some of the first firearms with interchangeable parts. Blanc demonstrated in front of a committee of scientists that his muskets could be assembled from a pile of parts selected at random. While a lot of people laughed at him for ‘inferior workmanship’ he did get the arms supplier contract from the military.  Around twenty years later Eli Whitney (who is most known for the Cotton Gin) applied this same principle when making guns for the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War – making him the low bidder for a defense contract like Mr. Blanc.  The Brits all had custom made muskets – one part broke and the entire gun had to be sent in for repair.  The Whitney musket needed only for the soldier to find another gun that could be cannibalized for spare parts.  What does this have to do with nozzle tips for molding machines?  The lesson learned from Blanc and Whitney was STANDARDIZATION.  The fewer part combinations, the easier it is to do something.  Thus Endth the history lesson for today.

Nozzles have to mate with the sprue bushings and satisfy two engineering prerequisites:  First, the ball diameter of the nozzle needs to be identical to that of the sprue bushing to ensure a proper shut off.  Second, the orifice (opening) of the machine nozzle needs to be slightly smaller than that of the sprue bushing so that the sprue can pull out the cold slug during mold opening/ejection phase of the cycle.
While these two prerequisites should be part of tooling specifications they are usually left for ‘someone else’ to figure out.  In some cases the mold arrives at the molder with a sprue bushing then a frantic hunt commences to find an appropriate mating nozzle.  Those who “Don’ pay it no never mind” simply jam a few thicknesses of cardboard between the nozzle tip and the bushing and ignore the burned cardboard ‘adaptor’ and its material contamination.  Other tool and die shops either ship the mold without a sprue bushing, or provide a sprue bushing blank with a sinker hole in the center with the thought that the molder will now build one to his liking.  Either way, this is excess fuss and bother nobody needs.

Standardization of the ball radius and nozzle opening saves having to swap out nozzle tips and thereby lowering the cost and time of mold changeovers. While mold specifications are good, many molders don’t have the luxury of giving them to the tool builder or input as the mold is being constructed.

First let’s attack the issue of the nozzle mating to the sprue bushing:  Ball Diameter.  It’s not always possible, but it would be nice to specify one or two sizes depending on the size of the press. To solve this problem for a few hundred bucks you can purchase a ball diameter cutter from the folks who sell sprue bushings.  This solves two problems:  (1) you mill a common ball diameter that works for your operation into every sprue bushing.  (2) Occasionally (?) an over-enthusiastic technician who is trying to pound out a stuck sprue will ding, scratch and generally muck up the line-for-line fit you need between the bushing and the nozzle tip.  This cutter will clean up this problem.  Problem stated; problem solved.

Second is the issue of the nozzle opening:  Many techs ‘work around’ this problem by having nozzle tips with really small openings, addressing the problem of the nozzle opening should be less than the sprue opening.  While this comes under the heading “While I may not be right but at least I’m not wrong.” it is poor form.  Many of the more popular resins used today are shear sensitive.  Squirting the material through a small opening into a large sprue and runner system lowers the effective pressure you can put on the melt to fill and pack as well as adding burning and streaking to the complications of running the part.  Moral: Follow the rule but make things as large as practically possible.  Back to standardization.  First settle in on a couple of sizes for your nozzle opening (these are material dependent).  Now using a tapered reamer, ream out the sprue to be slightly larger than the nozzle’s opening.  By doing this you’ve enhanced the ability to fill and minimized all the shear caused production problems.  Problem stated; problem solved.

Third, it would be nice if all nozzles had the same internal design.  No such luck.  There are shut off, anti drool, general purpose, tapered and non-tapered styles just to mention a few.  Each has its application so even if we’ve standardized on a ball radius and perhaps a few nozzle opening sizes; we’re stuck with the variables of ‘style’.  Even worse trying to figure out what style, shape and the opening diameter is messy:  the nozzle is usually covered with molten/burnt material, heater bands and when in the machine – pretty darn HOT!.   Color coding or tagging nozzles is an impractical way to identify them.  Trying to read the manufacturer’s engraved description is also difficult because it isn’t very deep.

The solution here is two-fold:
(1)    Using a grinder carve a few notches in a non functional area identifying the diameter and radius.  In LARGE, DEEP, BOLD letters stamp a code for the style of the nozzle tip. Any tech who can count can figure your coding out if its big and obvious.
(2)    The best solution for the proper nozzle tip to mate with the appropriate mold is “idiot proofing.”  (If I was one with letters after my name: LLC - Learned Lean Cognizanti - I would use the currently hip Japanese Phrase for this concept. But I’ll stick to the more commonly understood moniker, saving the multilingual phrases for management presentations.)  The method here is simple.  Let’s suppose a mold requires a nozzle tip that is the “B” configuration and has two notches cut in it.  This would mean the mold required a “2B” nozzle.  We idiot proof this concept by stamping/engraving “2B” on the top of the mold’s locator ring.  This is easily visible while hanging the mold and even visible when looking at it through the stationary platen.  It only takes a quick comparison of the required nozzle tip to what’s on the machine to see if everything is proper and correct.  Even middle management can do it with a minimum of instruction!
Problem stated; problem solved.

Using the right machine nozzle on a mold is a concept as simple as sticking your right hand into a right handed glove.  However it is amazing how people ignore its importance.  Getting the right parts to work together improves productivity, reduces scrap and insures consistent quality when the mold is run in a different press.

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This article is virtual.  You can read it and loudly declare “Standardized Nozzles? We don’ need no stinking Standardized Schnozzles!!” and live in the world of General Purpose everything wondering why the guy down the street hangs his molds faster, has better yields and lower costs.  Or, since this is a simple system you can incorporate it into your business and reap the benefits. OR you can read it, laugh at it, use it to scare the ‘know it all’ new engineer, and then store it in your ‘Pearl Harbor’ file until your company goes out of business because they didn’t take advantage of every possible competitive edge.

Your choice.

The Mission Statement or the ‘Goal’ is what you need to focus on to succeed.  Think of it this way:  The General gives a highly motivating speech telling the troops they are going to conquer the enemy.  When he leaves, the Master Sergeant gets up and says: “Here’s how we’re going to do it . . . . . . “  It is the sergeant who is presenting the Goal statement.

First, let’s look at the unsaid but terribly important underpinnings of any company:
1.    stay in business.
2.    make profit.
3.    if at all possible, grow.
While any or all of these could be Goal statements, they are really rules of survival and too vague to use as a goal.

Second, FACE THE FACTS:
1.  The customer is rarely right, usually because he can’t specify what he needs.
2.  The only corporations who are in business to lose money are churches and political parties.  Molders are neither.
3.  Neither you or your customer have any obligation to do business with each other.
4.  Both you and your customer must make an acceptable profit as the result of doing business to sustain any business relationship.

Let’s look at some excellent, but silly “Company Goals” That miss the facts and don’t lead to success.

The absolute classic came from Ford Motor as an ad campaign: “Quality is Job #1”.  No it isn’t. Scrap reduction might be Job 1 or profit improvement, but if all your corporate energy is invested in the Continual Quest for Quality – your standards will be so high you either can’t make the product at all; or your costs will be so high, nobody will do business with you. Get a grip – that’s not a goal, it’s a fantasy (and nobody believes that hooey anyway).  Quality only needs to be sufficient.  If it truly needs to be Job #1 you are probably already in deep do-do.

Here’s another you see very often in the front lobby:  “Our mission is to be market driven, meeting or exceeding the customer’s expectations”.  Catch a clue!  If the truth be told, the customer’s expectations are they want the Crown Jewels for free, with you holding a year’s worth of inventory he can draw on whenever he wants, and he can reject anything and everything not only for ‘defective parts’ but also if he mistakenly ordered to many and simply wants to reduce his inventory. Who are you trying to fool?

And lastly: “. . . . .To strive to improve relationships with our customers and expand our business base within the market sectors we specialize in  . . .  .”  Those molders who threw in their lot with the automotive industry when it went in the tank, have probably figured out sometimes your customers or the market sector you play in, is not a source of continued growth.  With the current mantra Cost is King!!! meaning “we’ll go to China because they are cheap and worry about quality and deliveries later”; your current customer base has the loyalty of a rattle snake. Get over yourself!  You are not that important in your customer’s eyes!  Standing on your ‘reputation’ is only as good as your last shipment.

Most people have found they are forcing a square peg into a round hole when they literally try to implement lean and the Toyota Way, unless they’re assembling cars.  But, this philosophy does have some wisdom that can be generalized into any industry:  Several times in the ’14 points’ of the Toyota philosophy they mention:  ‘Make your decisions based only on your goals’, ‘Promote and nurture people who support the goals’, ‘Nurture a learning environment that supports the goals’.  They sound a little hung up on this goal thing, but in reality it is perfect!

If everyone is focused on the same thing look what disappears:
1.    trivial projects
2.    short term thinking (at the expense of more profitable long term thinking)
3.    interdepartmental ‘white tower’ mentality of ‘it’s not my job’
4.    a culture of ‘experts’ who keep their expertise a closely guarded secret because they consider it their key to job security.

If your goal was: “Produce acceptable parts for our customers at the least possible cost.”  What are the consequences of this Goal?
1.    If the customer wants the Crown Jewels, so long as he can specify and is willing to pay for them, you’ll produce them.
2.    There is a crystal clear, free from interpretation, definition of quality.  Functional things work.  Cosmetics are not a beauty contest but clearly specified under the guidance of the SPI standards of time and distance.  Parts are ‘to print’ because after they passed functionally, the designs were respecified to match the functional parts.
3.    There’s no need for CpKs, PPAP and all the other profit eaters unless the customer is willing to pay for it; because the manufacturing process is robust and the part quality is clearly specified and predictable.

But the fun part to this goal is what it does to the employees. It gives everybody focus on the same thing:
1.    Now when something new comes up – i.e.  the requirement for inspecting more dimensions, a new tool arrives, etc. - Anyone can ask “What does this requirement do to support this goal?”
2.    It stops in infamous ‘throw it over the wall’ mentality of dumping a new tool in production’s lap without sufficient documentation, jigs, fixtures and gauges.
3.    It stops engineering from not documenting everything they are supposed to.
4.    It stops quality from ‘raising the bar’ because they don’t understand the quality specs so they arbitrarily raise them because they are afraid of releasing ‘bad parts’.
5.    It stops freebies: If the agreed lot size was 1,000 parts (setup plus run cost), customer service will no longer authorize a 100 part shipment (or JIT run) except, for example, with the policy of “The first part will cost you $250.35 (setup and run cost for one part + freight) with every other part costing $.35 each plus packaging and shipping.” – This satisfies the customer’s need for the 100 parts but also complies with the goal.

Most importantly a goal of this type does some things to people’s thinking:
– If you ask somebody what they are doing to support the goal in the context of doing their job, you’d better be able to have as good an answer when the question thrown back at you.  This kind of conversation keeps everybody competent and frosty.
–Instead of covering yourself with excuses, it forces you to do the job they hired you for or quickly ask for the tools to acquire the tools/expertise you need.
–It completely stops the ‘Not my Job’ syndrome.
– As a corollary, this kind of a goal allows everybody to ‘buy in’ to the company.  They now have permission to be proud that they are contributing AND they can call out anyone else who’s a slacker.

With the focus of a clear goal that can be understood, supported, and directly contributed to; everyone begins to feel important.  This kind of focus builds the teamwork that makes profitable companies. If you want to survive this recession, start thinking about how you are going to get your team of fellow employees to help each other make profitable parts.

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This article is virtual. You can read this, agree with it fully but hide in the shadows and continue to support the ‘Mom, Apple Pie, Queen and Country’ type corporate goal and wonder why other businesses are doing well and you’re not.  Or, without contradicting the folks in the Ivory Tower, simply rethink what’s engraved in the lobby and re-interpret it to something that everyone can get their minds around.  OR you can use this to scare the rats in the warehouse and do nothing.

I just try to help people who are willing to learn and listen.

Your choice