Arm your business to operate profitably no matter what the industry demands.
Plastics manufacturers and rubber products makers face pressure to produce with higher quality, efficiency, on-time delivery, pricing, and cost control. Ever-growing customer demand and global competition forces plastic and rubber parts and products manufacturers to increase flexibility and profitability.
Plastics and rubber manufacturing are intensely complex markets:
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.
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:
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Explore more for metals manufacturing and fabricated metal products:
Which OEE solution is right for your company?
OEE isn’t dead – in fact, it’s one of many important stepping stones toward Industry 4.0 and digitalization.
Even if your company has older equipment, you can put an OEE system to work for your business. We can help you connect and feed an OEE system:
Use our self-assessment questionnaire to capture your requirements, and we’ll provide you a list of up to five OEE software vendors that are right for your unique situation. It’s a fast, easy way to narrow down which solutions might be right for you.