Many items we use every day are produced by injection molding, including vehicle bumpers, computer mouse chassis and even scissor handles.
Traditionally, manufacturers often go through a two-step process in order to obtain a finished part. They initially turn to mold vendors to obtain tooling followed by injection molding companies to source out the production of these parts.
In doing this the manufacturer can be setting themselves up for difficulties down the road. This is because mold builders often lack the knowledge that molders have acquired through many years of trial and error.
Mold vendors take the required specifications from their customers and produce a mold. This mold is then provided to the injection molding company to manufacture the parts.
If the part produced is not designed with the correct materials, final products can fail in testing or in consumer’s hands. This quickly leads to disagreements between mold vendors and injection molders about what part of the production process went wrong.
Commonly enough, failure of injection molded parts is not an issue of bad practice on anyone’s part, but rather due to a reliance on cheap, low-durability materials in order to obtain a lower cost mold.
For quality parts with the appropriate durability, manufacturers need to invest appropriately.
Enter the Turnkey Injection Molding Manufacturer
“How do we know who is to blame when a part goes bad?” is the wrong question. Instead, manufacturers need to ask who can complete a project start to finish all in-house, eliminating the middle man. This simplifies the process and provides a more reliable assurance of quality.
The answer to this question is a “turnkey manufacturer” and K&B Molded Products (K&B) is one such company.
In business since 1964, K&B is both a mold vendor and injection molder rolled into one. Despite their dual service, they still experience customers cutting corners with cheap materials while employing a middleman.
“We’re dealing with a customer like that right now,” said Ed Kuhns, director of sales at K&B. “The customer had their mold built and then brought it to us. We’re having quite a few problems because of the way the tool was built. They short-cut everything in it because the customer was trying to get a cheap mold.”
Turnkey manufacturers help their customers by providing advice on mold designs before the production process begins. This is beneficial, as tooling is often the most expensive part of the injection molding process.
Working with a Turnkey Supplier
Manufacturers can also call in turnkey suppliers like K&B during the design stages of their mold.
“Our best advice to manufacturers is to get your turnkey provider of choice involved as early as possible in the design process for the best value for your dollar,” said Joe Berberich, president of K&B.
This kind of close communication between a customer and their supplier can lead to greater trust between partners. Subsequently, this means a more reliable business partnership and initiates conversation about the best material selection for the end user’s application.
“We give our customers information on potential materials because they are the ones who understand what their product is exposed to in the end use,” Kuhns explained. “We can give advice on designing parts, help them find ways to save money on the tool, give them suggestions on the thousands of materials they could use and the variations of their fillers and everything they put into those materials.”
Temperatures and chemicals that products may come in contact with are extremely important in material selection, for example.
“Every plastic has its strengths and weaknesses,” Kuhns explained. “We need as much information as we can get to be as much help to our customers as possible.”
The Risks of Offshoring
Some suppliers known for their cheap and fast turnarounds may not always have a genuine promise of quality, which is a risk too great to take. Those at K&B have their fair share of brand-theft horror stories.
“I’ve heard of offshoring situations where manufacturers would go over and realize that two sets of tools had been built and they were told all of these were backup tools,” Kuhns said.
He continued, “Well, the backup tools were used to build products to sell [elsewhere]. Some companies don’t seem to believe this is stealing… There are some fantastic suppliers [around the world], but they’re not the ones selling you $2,000 molds when they’re going for $20,000 in the US.”
While manufacturing trends over the years have seen projects shipped overseas for cost savings, more companies are now heavily investing in reshoring. Overseas manufacturers don’t always meet the same quality standards like ISO 9001:2008 that are often a prerequisite for U.S. and Canadian companies.
Offshore manufacturers are also more distant which can lead to difficulties in timely communication as well as long lead times in making changes to existing products — much different from the partnership that working with an at-home turnkey solution delivers.
K&B boasts 51 years of industry experience and utilizes 26 machines ranging from 66 to 733 tons. In addition to custom injection molding, K&B also offers insert molding, overmolding, hot stamping, heat transfer and sonic welding services.
To learn more about how turnkey manufacturers like K&B Molded Products can help, download your copy of their ebook, The Benefits of Using a Turnkey Manufacturer. To view their website, click here.
K&B Molded Products has sponsored this post. They have no editorial input into this post. All opinions are mine. James Anderton.