Plastics and Rubber Manufacturing

Toward Zero helps you meet industry pressures and performance improvement objectives head on , so that your business can grow profits.

Plastics and rubber manufacturing are intensely complex markets:

• Volatile raw material availability and costs
• Growing customer demand for quantity and variety
• Thin margins
• Pressure for higher quality and value-added services accelerating
• Fierce competition, locally and globally
• Customer price sensitivity
• Always-increasing customer requirements and complexity

Modern processes, techniques, and technologies can help your organization win despite the pressure.

As you look for new opportunities to grow revenue and maintain healthy margins, digitally-powered initiatives like operational excellence, continuous improvement, and Lean keep your business strong. Even if the organization is eager for modernization, it might not know where to get started or how to make the gains sustainable.

Overcome complex pressures common for plastics manufacturing and rubber manufacturing.

Toward Zero helps you set priorities for processes, culture, and technology so you can overcome the complex pressures and obstacles so common in plastics and rubber manufacturing today:

• Ensure your business is flexible and profitable while delivering on customer service
• Get high-quality products to your customers on time and without compromising operational efficiency or margins
• Uncover and act on performance opportunities and ensure gains are sustainable
• Use continuous improvement, metrics, and analytics on the shop floor and in business processes to achieve operational efficiency
• Establish processes and systems to capture and apply tribal knowledge from retiring workforce
• Help you choose the right technologies to serve the business while attracting younger, digitally savvy workers
• Recommend the right mix of technologies so you ensure customer service, increase flexibility, and grow margins
• Juggle complex and operations along with fast-changing order variations
• Reduce waste in production and processes
• Reduce downtime, increase OEE, and achieve optimal production scheduling
• Achieve regulatory compliance and meet industry standards without eroding operational performance or margins
• Eliminate data gaps across legacy “vintage” machines

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Services and solutions that fit your business today and meet your needs as they evolve.

Every plastics or rubber manufacturing company has a unique mix of operating environment, industry concerns, and customer requirements. Toward Zero helps you increase revenue and profitability in a way that’s right for your business.

Injection molding, thermal forming, extrusion, materials manufacturing, and tool and die manufacturing have vastly different processes, pressures, resources, and capabilities. What they all have in common is the desire to use operations as a way to improve the bottom line. However, the path to operations performance is unique for every single organization.

CNC Machining

Smaller but more complex and varied lot sizes, demand for greater precision, and quality pressures, make running a CNC operation more challenging than ever before. These factors may mean intricate engineering and re-engineering of parts, process variation for alternate materials, and premature tool wear or failure. The result can be bottlenecks and a less-than-efficient operation that affects on-time delivery, overtime, re-work and other operational metrics. High-precision contract manufacturing means that plastics companies with CNC machining processes don't have the luxury of time to dial up performance during job runs.  Instead, they must focus on establishing a repeatable general process so they can quickly and efficiently switch between contract jobs.

Injection Molding, Thermal Forming, and Blow Molding

Injection molding, thermal forming, and blow molding companies operate across a wide variety of industries: packaging, consumer products, electronics, automotive, aerospace, building and construction, and others.  Depending on which sector your organization serves, you may have strict quality and compliance requirements, product demand pressures, or both.  Your goal is to maximize every efficiency and quality opportunity to manufacture and deliver highest quality products as quickly as possible.

Extrusion

Tight margins drive extrusion manufacturers to increase productivity, reduce cost, improve performance and maximize profit.  Uptime, waste, yield, and raw materials optimization are what matter most.  By aligning processes, equipment, and culture they can optimize performance and sustain improvement gains.

Materials Manufacturing

The wide variety of uses of plastics as a preferred material for parts and products across construction, automotive, packaging, and consumer products means that resin manufacturers must satisfy a vast variety of requirements.  Material variation can affect end-product quality, defects, and production errors.  Your production processes have a significant impact on quality, and can affect acceptance of entire lots of product.  Materials manufacturers that want to meet timing and quality requirements rely on operational performance initiatives to stay ahead of the competition.

Tool and Die Manufacturing

Despite inexpensive and efficient processes, tool and die companies face complex challenges in today’s market. Digitalization, rapidly retiring workforce, shifting market and customer requirements, and heavy utility consumption are common concerns among tool and die manufacturing companies. Add in raw materials price pressures and tool and die companies are eager to capitalize on modernization and operations performance improvements.