Cover Story
May 1st, 2007 Print this article 25 Notable Processors 2007By Modern Plastics Editorial Staff Driving growth, training employees, helping the community, developing their own machinery...Our annual roster of Notable Processors recognizes 25 of your peers, people from around the globe who are making a positive impact within the plastic processing universe.
1. Ajedium Film Group/Kathie Cerchio
After a business plan to create a company focused on high-temperature films was approved, the most pressing need for the startup was a name. “We wanted a word that did not exist. We wanted it to start with an A, sound Latin—or at least unique—and be pronounceable to people all over the world,” explains Kathie Cerchio. When a Google search revealed no hits, Ajedium Film Group LLC (Newark, DE) was born, borrowing from the names of the startup’s financial backers, Al and Rick Giacco (including Rick’s late wife Edith), as well as “um”, the Greek letter Mu backwards, which is used as a unit of measure, especially in the thin films the company specializes in, which go down to 5 µm.
Cerchio and Ajedium cofounder Pete Woloson have watched sales double every year since the firm began production on Dec. 22, 2002 with a roll of 2-mm thick TPX polymethylpentene film and have fully paid back Al Giacco his seed money. “At 88-years-old [Al] is still the inspiration and visionary he was at the start,” Cerchio says.
Woloson, Cerchio, and the Giacco’s came together at Empower Materials in 2000, which Al Giacco founded and son Rick ran as chairman and president.
The Giacco’s bought in to Woloson and Cerchio’s plan for films focused on high-end materials like imides, ketones, sulfones, fluoropolymers, acetals, and urethanes, as well as styrenics and polyolefins.
Ajedium boosted production capacity 60% in December 2006 and added slitting and rewinding in January. Now, 14 employees manage two lines running five days a week with three shifts at the company’s 30,000-ft² plant.
High-performance resins like PEEK allow Ajedium to provide heat, chemical, UV, and flame resistance, but not without challenges and recognition. “We toll extrude for some of the largest and most well-respected resin suppliers in the industry,” Cerchio says, “because our capabilities allow us to make films thinner and with tighter tolerances than they can themselves.”
2. Poon Chuan Ang
Bigger is better when it comes to LLDPE stretch film and Thong Guan Industries Berhad (Sungai Petani, Malaysia) is backing this belief with investments that it hopes will propel it into the top 10 producers globally for the film product by 2010, with a share of approximately 4%. Thong Guan managing director Poon Chuan Ang forecasts worldwide demand in 2010 for stretch film will be something like 3.2 million tonnes so these are indeed lofty ambitions. But already, the processor is well on the way to reaching its goal. The firm has 50,000 tonnes/yr of capacity in Malaysia, 30,000 tonnes/yr in Suzhou, China, and 8,000 tonnes/yr at a joint venture in Thailand in which it holds a 30% stake.
All of this is coming at a time when high resin costs are eating into the firm’s margins but Ang says this presents a Catch 22 situation. “High raw-material prices mean we have to continue growing to reduce costs through economies of scale in order to remain competitive.” Ang says another challenge for the firm is to identify niche end users where better prices can be commanded.
Thong Guan’s presence in China will be one key to achieving its growth ambitions. “The Chinese economy is more vibrant than ASEAN’s and will remain that way for the next five years,” says Ang. “We’ve now acquired enough ‘knowhow-and-who’ and are ready to move aggressively into the Mainland market, which is riskier but offers better returns.” Thong Guan also makes garbage bags (30,000 tonnes/yr) and industrial and laminated bags, films, and sheets (12,000 tonnes/yr) in Malaysia and China.
3. Somsak Borrisuttanakul
In today’s business environment, characterized by high resin prices, production efficiency is paramount, and nowhere more so than in the commodity plastic bag sector, where 70% or more of costs are due to raw materials. Thai Plastic Bags Industries (Sampran, Thailand) managing director Somsak Borrisuttanakul expects elevated plastics pricing to stay the norm at least until late 2008, and his company is going about ensuring profitability through a unique approach: building its own film lines, which incorporate inline printing and bag making. “Five years ago, we won an Internet auction to supply Target that required a major capacity expansion in the space of three months,” recalls Borrisuttanakul. “Our Japanese and Taiwanese machinery suppliers could not meet the required lead time so we designed, engineered, and assembled our own lines.” The processor has added 150 extrusion lines since 2001 for a total of 250, albeit average capacity is 30 tonnes per line per month. “Small lines give us flexibility, and lower investment costs significantly,” says Borrisuttanakul. Thai Plastic Bags ships 100 containers per month to Target, each containing around 20 tonnes of bags. Overall shipments are on the order of 7000 tonnes/month of HDPE, LDPE, and LLDPE bags.
4. Erich Braun
This year marks 30 years in business for BraunForm (Bohlingen, Germany), certainly best known as a manufacturer of top-line injection molds, but also for the last 10 years a prominent injection molder in its own right with nearly a 30-press stable it calls its own. The firm plans some typical celebrations for its anniversary, of course, but also continues to show its innovative ways by taking on a new project for a multimaterial ceramic injection molding.
BraunForm took life with only a handful of employees but today employs 217 and serves as both injection moldmaker and contract processor, with annual revenues greater than ?26 million (about $34 million). Over the last three decades, nearly 135 apprentices have been trained by the firm, with more than half still employed there, including the first two apprentices. Customers come out of the personal care, pharma and diagnostics, automotive, and electric industries, often purchasing multicomponent, multicavity, high-precision molds, as well as tasking Braun with contract molding. The firm’s Pharma Technologies operation serves the medical industry, molding closures and other high-volume parts. Working with a pharmacologist, the firm developed its own product, the Adapplicator, a needle-free alternative for administering medicine. The company also takes on high-end non-medical molding for customers in automotive, personal care, and other markets.
5. Callum Chen
Three years ago, the mission statement of high-end Malaysian housewares molder Lee Huat Plastics Industries espoused unity, trust and respect, resourcefulness, integrity, and professionalism. These now read innovative, candid, resourceful, responsive, and reliable. “Previously our core values were somewhat general nouns but now they’re adjectives that describe exactly the type of people we need to be to succeed in business,” says chief executive officer Callum Chen. “If we don’t innovate we will be out of business, and if we don’t have staff candid enough to step forward and say the boss is wrong we are in trouble too. Candidness is something alien to the Chinese business culture,” he adds.
Chen also admits to being a sucker for training, and not always of the generic type. He often invites experts in to give talks on themes that could include cartons, boxes, and labels. Every third Saturday morning of the month is devoted to training and everyone, including the accountant, attends what is a carnival-like event. “We are also actively into personal profiling to honestly evaluate our strengths and weaknesses, and view situational leadership as important,” says Chen.
Chen’s aim is to make Lee Huat a knowledge-based company and this involves such strategies as greater emphasis on original design and manufacture (ODM) and use of tools such as failure mode effect analysis. “We want to develop products with lots of features, minus the high price,” says Chen.
Investment in cutting-edge technologies such as all-electric injection machines is part of this drive. Nine 300-tonne all-electrics are coming in as part of phase one of an expansion, and six more are planned.
6. Dale Evans
When MPW caught up with Dale Evans, president of custom molder/moldmaker Evco Plastics (Deforest, WI), he was battling jet lag from a just-finished trip to China. The company’s two businesses there are a long way, literally and figuratively, from Evans’ introduction to injection molding in 1964 in his family’s basement, but to ensure Evans doesn’t forget, the sign above his desk reads, “It’s just a bigger basement.”
Bigger indeed. Evco now encompasses 600,000 ft² of manufacturing, with 900 employees in the U.S., Mexico, and China, generating 2006 sales just shy of $100 million. The company’s 135 injection molding machines average 400 tons, with the largest at 3300 tons—a step up from the pneumatically-powered 14-ton plunger machine back in the basement.
Evans’ only hiatus came during college at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, where he studied industrial technology, emphasizing design. Upon graduation in 1973, he returned to Evco, and by 1981, his father handed him the shop keys. “He basically left the state and said, ‘Dale, run the business,’” Evans recalls with a laugh. “I was 30 years old at the time.”
Run he did, blazing through 10 years of 24% average annual growth, and expanding the company’s reach. Evans’ first trip to China was in 1986, and by 1989, he returned with capital, betting on the country when American investors were sparse. “We missed some opportunities in dealing with Japan, and in the mid-’80s, when opportunities for China came up, I kind of saw the same thing happening,” Evans says.
Now Evco has 50 employees in moldbuilding and 150 in injection molding in China, adding that both businesses have always made money. Back in Wisconsin, Evans’ two college-age daughters have done some work at the plant, and if they like, will have an opportunity to follow in their father’s and grandather’s footsteps, with one caveat.
“We’re encouraging them to get a job elsewhere for a few years, get some experience, and then they’ll be welcomed back in the business, if they can do the job,” Evans says.
7. Richard Freeman
Freetech Plastics celebrates 31 years in business in May, and founder and owner Richard Freeman says he’s never desired to do anything else. The company provides full-service product design and development, pressure forming, thermoforming, and a variety of secondary operations for the structural components the company produces. “Nothing else has ever intrigued me as much as this business,” says Freeman. “I still like finding new solutions to customer requirements, finding new opportunities, and maintaining a spirit of innovation. I try to never say no to an idea.”
That spirit is reflected in the company’s motto: “We’ll make it like you want it.” And Freeman says Freetech really tries to do that. “That might mean we have to think outside the pressure box,” he quips. Located in the heart of the Silicon Valley in Fremont, CA, business hasn’t been easy. “It’s such a volatile, changing place that we’ve often had to reinvent the company as Silicon Valley has reinvented itself.”
Change comes rapidly in a place best known for technology innovation. “In the early 1980s, we had the first crash in the computer business, when IBM came into the market and blew all the others out of the water. They were using thermoformed enclosures then, and that work evaporated when IBM came into the market with the personal computer,” explains Freeman. That was just one of many flips in the valley. The semiconductor capital equipment companies were also good customers, but suddenly all that production moved to China. Ditto for the disc-drive industry, taking lot of companies under at that time.
If morphing into a new company to take advantage of new opportunities was a challenge, Freeman did it well. Today, the company specializes in heavy-gauge enclosures for high-end medical diagnostics equipment enclosures, scientific test equipment enclosures, and electrical enclosures.
One of Freeman’s keys to success was that he worked very closely with the industrial design community in the Silicon Valley, and became a member of the IDSA a few years ago. “Because we’ve worked with industrial designers we always try to say yes to new products, new ways of doing things,” Freeman says. “Traditionally, processors like to dumb a product down to fit the process, but we’ve always tried to raise the process up to fit their needs, even it meant going beyond the familiar into new territory.”
Freeman says this attitude has brought the pressure forming and thermoforming industry to a higher level. “You have to step up to what the customers are looking for because all the easy stuff is going overseas,” he says. “It’s hard work asking toolmakers and process technicians to step up to a new level constantly, but stuff that was considered impossible in our industry 20 years ago is being done by a lot of people today.”
Freeman’s hard work in the industry has not gone unrecognized. Last year at the SPE Thermoforming Convention in Nashville, TN, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award for his work with the SPE. Freeman is also active in promoting a “matching grant program” to place thermoforming machines in schools with plastics programs, and promote education in the industry.
8. Tony Gaukroger
Innovation is one thing that permeates the U.K.’s largest independent specialty masterbatcher, Colour Tone Masterbatch (Bedwas, Wales), and it is something that has been recognized throughout the industry. Managing director Tony Gaukroger accepted the Welsh Innovation Company of the Year award two years ago and beat a tool and die maker as well as a software development business to take the honors. His was only the second plastics-related company to achieve success in the awards during the 10-year history of the event.
The masterbatcher took the award for its free-flowing granular Vynacol coloring plus additives package technology tailored to specific rigid PVC applications. The material helps overcome color consistency problems.
Besides regular investments in lab and production equipment, the company generally devotes 10% of its sales turnover/yr on development work and has acquired outside funding for projects such as a Smart Grant from the Welsh Assembly which promotes local industry.
With a turnover of about ?6 million/yr and a staff of 37, the company has prospered since it opened 11 years ago. Although not large in employee numbers, Gaukroger says he sees the company as more than just a producer of pounds and pence. “We’re not a charity but we do care about people who live and work here in Wales,” he says. That is one reason he hired two “educationally challenged” people as part of the staff.
And the plan has worked. The first person in this category, initially hired to do manual labor, has since graduated to the point where he can operate one of the company’s twin-screw compounders under supervision. “It’s more than just earning money. This has given people who essentially had fallen between the cracks in our society the self-respect of holding a job, no matter how menial it may appear to us. It helps build their confidence, and they have proven to be loyal and hard working,” he says.
9. Ilie Harfas
Complete solutions from a single source is what this operation, in one of the newest European Union member countries, prides itself on. Plastor (Oradea, Romania) has found success in offering OEMs everything: from 2D and 3D mold design with ProEngineer and Euclid, to moldmaking with a range of CNC milling and spark erosion equipment, injection or extrusion blowmolding, printing, packaging, and logistics, says commercial manager Ilie Harfas, one of three executive managers at the company. The company builds molds up to 4.5 tonnes, with an average of 100 processing tools being constructed a year. Of those not used in-house, 80% are exported to Western Europe.
The company, founded in 1914 as a small workshop to produce brushes and combs, sees its future serving the automotive, sport and leisure markets, as well as the white goods sector. Prior to privatization in 1990 the company had a huge staff of 2500, which has been pared down to 1000. Gone are the cushy days of government contracts and shoddy output. Today, says Luca Moga, marketing manager, the company has to scramble across Europe for every contract.
The firm’s record of customers and repeat orders speaks for itself. Top names such as Electrolux, Peguform, Dacia-Renault, Germany’s Brill group, maker of garden and lawn equipment, and Daewoo order molds and have parts processed at the company. A range of French ski boots and bindings sold under the Solomon brand originate from Plastor, which has offered everything from design to injection molding to distribution for that company since 1993.
What makes for the success? Harfas cites attention to quality (the operation has 50 Western European name-brand injection molding machines with clamping force ranging from 50–1100 tonnes), a moderate wage scale, and a location near the Hungarian border. The location eases distribution and is an advantage over Romanian processors located further inland, says Harfas, where many roads remain in the same state as when Nicolae Ceausescu was dictator.
This growing company had a sales turnover of ?16 million last year and prides itself as being the first Romanian processor to use gas injection molding to produce container handles. “Our future is tied to processing technical parts,” says Harfas.
10. Stephanie Harkness
When Stephanie Harkness purchased an ailing custom injection molder in Northern California in 1989, customers were jumping ship and it was anything but a thriving business. However, in the nearly two decades that Harkness, an experienced businesswoman, and her husband Jack, an engineer, have owned the company, they have created a premier custom molding company, Pacific Plastics & Engineering (Soquel, CA).
Harkness brought a fresh perspective to the industry, and with her strong business background began building a company based on engineering expertise, quality, and customer service for the medical device, computer components, and electronics industries, among others. PP&E provides product design and development, program management, Moldflow analysis, and mold design and build.
Pacific Plastics & Engineering is the 10th-largest woman-owned business in the San Francisco Bay area and has had 25% annual growth since 1989. Harkness was featured on Peter Jennings’ World News Tonight in 2003, and covered in Time Magazine the same year. She was also been featured in a Wall Street Journal article on entrepreneurial manufacturers. Harkness has also served on the Board of Directors for the National Association of Manufacturers.
On March 19 of this year, the company completed a six-year initiative and received its 13485 Certfication, the medical device standard. “We’re the only company in the Bay area who has received that certification,” says Harkness. PP&E operates 20 machines from 24 to 230 tons, including six all-electrics in the Class 7 (Class 10,000) clean room, and performs secondary operations such as decorating, subassembly and packaging.
In 2001 Harkness opened a joint venture molding facility in Bangalore, India, which, with a strong vendor alliance in Taipei, Taiwan, gives PP&E the ability to provide contract manufacturing services globally. Both locations feature Class 100,000 clean rooms.
Harkness is proud of PP&E’s strong customer relations. “We’ve just been approved as a supplier to two Johnson & Johnson divsions, something we’re very proud of since they are in the process of reducing their vendor base from 600 to 100, and we made the cut,” Harkness says.
When asked to name the keys to the company’s success, Harkness is quick to point the fact that she has focused the company on training, which has resulted in PP&E being a strong, team-driven operation. “The other key is that we’re really closely coupled with our customers and what they’re trying to achieve, ultimately, for their businesses,” she says. “We try to look at every project in a holistic way and try to make it successful from the outset.”
11. Duane Jebbett
When the family shareholders of Rowmark Inc. (Findlay, OH) sold controlling interest in the company to management, with the backing of Clearview Capital LLC, an Old Greenwich, CT-based private investment firm, the company moved into a new era, following a trend of many family-owned plastics processing concerns. Growing a viable processing business over many years requires much effort on the part of the family, and it becomes a labor of love. Selling the business when it’s time to retire can be a more difficult proposition.
Rowmark began in 1987 as a division of drainage pipe manufacturer Hancor Inc. In October 1997 former Hancor CEO Fred Kremer purchased Rowmark from Hancor and started the move to a new facility in Findlay’s Tall Timbers Industrial Park.
But on December 20, 1997, Mr. Kremer and two other employees were killed in a private plane crash. The Kremer family continued to operate the company, appointing Duane Jebbett as president in September 1998; Jebbett and other senior management now control the company, with the Kremers maintaining a minority interest.
Rowmark’s “bread and butter” business is the signage and engraving materials market, and the company has invested heavily in capital equipment to service that market, Jebbett says.
Rowmark also responded to strong demand for its custom extruded products with the creation of Premier Material Concepts (PMC) in 2003 to service new and alternative markets such as recreational vehicle and automotive aftermarket, with products such as TPE non-skid foot pads. Additionally, says Jebbett, the company is starting to market its TPE sheet products for the thermoforming industry, for use on garage doors, the bumpers on ultility doors found in retail establishments, and more.
Also in 2003, a joint venture between Rowmark and Austria’s Trodat created a company called Tromark, which has become a global leader in self-inking stamps. Trodat and Rowmark have created a strong distribution network for its engraving products.
Rowmark has expanded its facility multiple times over the past several years and now has more than 75,000 ft² under its roof, and employs 92 people. Rowmark and PMC are well known for their corporate culture, Jebbett says, and he considers his mission to continue the community involvement legacy that Fred Kremer started.
12. Ho Duc Lam
As recently as 2000, 40% of Vietnam’s plastics processing sector was state-owned and accounted for 60% of output. A wave of privatization, however, means that as of 2007, 95% of the industry is now in private hands and a new breed of entrepreneurs is charged with taking the industry into a phase of modernization and globalization. One of those young guns is Ho Duc Lam, general director of Rang Dong Plastics Joint-Stock Co. (Ho Chi Minh City) and vice president of the Vietnam Plastics Association.
Rang Dong started life in 1960 as a processor of PVC sheet and synthetic leather, and ventured into packaging in 1992. Lam sees this latter sector as one with 30% per annum growth potential and is backing this with a major $6 million investment in a flexible PE and nylon packaging film facility. The new factory is ISO 14000 and HACPP certified and manufactures packaging to international standards for multinational clients with operations in Vietnam, such as Unilever and Dutch Lady.
“WTO integration has opened up the economy and we have many multinational and regional competitors in the packaging sector. We have to compete on an equal basis with them, but such is growth that there is ample room for healthy competition,” says Lam.
Even in its traditional business, globalization is forcing change. “Customers in Europe now want EVA-based raincoats instead of PVC ones,” notes Lam.
As in other countries, high resin costs have impacted Rang Dong’s business.
“We cannot compromise quality so we have increased capacity and cut production costs to maintain competitiveness,” says Lam. “We’ve switched from dry and wet lamination to co-extrusion and reduced costs by 20%-30%, reduced scrap levels from 5% to 1%, and upgraded process control to give better control over product weight, among other measures.”
13. Kok Boon Lim
Kok Boon Lim is a relative newcomer to the plastics sector, having left the corporate world and assumed the role of chief executive officer at Malaysian packaging firm Great Wall Plastic Industries (Selangor) in 2002, but already he is a man on a mission. “My two priorities are the environment and developing human resources to address environmental issues,” says Lim, who is also president of the Malaysian Plastics Manufacturers Association (MPMA).
As a newcomer, Lim has a somewhat different perspective to environmental legislation. “It’s in our best interests to set the regulatory tone rather than have it imposed on us. That’s why we’ve set up a committee that spans the entire industry chain incorporating all interested parties in the plastics sector, including materials suppliers, processors, recyclers, and waste management firms,” he notes. In the words of Lim, the newly established Malaysian Plastics Forum is a common platform that will give the industry the technology and human resources to handle environmental issues.
Now that the chain is in place, Lim plans to engage with the government to develop an environmental strategy. Recent efforts include sending a party of 33 to Japan for a training course in recycling, and a proposal for a material recovery facility. “We hope to develop a system where waste management companies can sell recycled material to recycling firms and generate income, while the recyclers themselves can expand their business as more material will be available for recycling,” says Lim. “It’s a win-win situation for all, including processors who will have access to lower-cost recycled material. Even though what we are doing is voluntary, in the end the industry will be compelled to participate as economics will be the driver.”
14. Rogerio Mani
Rogerio Mani is no stranger to the packaging business. He entered the industry over 30 years ago at age 14, when he began working at a plastics recycling company and raw material distributor. After working with several established plastics companies, he went into business for himself. Today, Mani is a partner at Sol Embalagens, one of Brazil’s largest flexible packaging companies. Sol has 10 plants throughout Brazil and is the largest seller of plastic supermarket bags in the country. The company currently processes roughly 6000 tonnes of resin monthly.
In addition to managing the sales of Sol, Mani is one of the plastics industry’s most vocal advocates. Mani was recently elected to his second two-year term as the president of the Brazilian Flexible Packaging Association (ABIEF). The Brazilian plastics industry has faced myriad difficulties in recent years, including growing competition from China, competition driven in part by the strong local currency. The industry has found it increasingly difficult to export products, partially because of the exchange rate, but also because of increasing production costs, which have squeezed the margins of local plastics companies.
Mani has lobbied tirelessly for the industry, focusing on unfair competition from China, distortions in the local tax system, and high resin prices. Mani describes himself as an optimist and as a result, he is hopefully that the government will modify the taxation schedule. He is also confident that recent consolidations in the petrochemicals industry, together with the increased role of Brazilian petroleum and chemicals supplier Petrobras in ABIEF, will help the industry. In addition to potentially lowering feedstock costs, having Petrobras on board will lend legitimacy to the industry.
“We see the light at the end of the tunnel and expect the domestic market to improve. Furthermore, we are prepared to resume exports again once it makes financial sense to do so,” Mani concluded.
15. Mark McGrath and Steven Moore
Any encounter with a sitting president will have a surreal feel, but given the circumstances forerunning Mark McGrath’s and Steven Moore’s grip-and-grin with George W. Bush, the meeting still belies their comprehension.
“I mean three-and-a-half years ago, Steve and I were just two guys out of work,” Chesapeake Plastics cofounder/ co-owner McGrath recalls.
“To realize three years later we’d be sitting down at the White House having breakfast with the president, or at the statehouse having lunch with the governor…two regular guys.”
Four years ago, Beltway Plastics, the injection molder that employed McGrath for 17 years and Moore for eight, closed its doors after the founder retired. Résumés were posted but when callbacks didn’t come, the pair took their future into their own hands, buying Beltway and creating Chesapeake Plastics Manufacturing (Prince Frederick, MD).
“We were notified that we were going to be out of a job, and within two weeks, we had a business plan together,” McGrath says. “In order to work with the customers we had, we had to be in business within 30 days.”
The pair purchased Beltway’s five injection molding machines, hired operators that hadn’t caught on elsewhere, and took over an existing contract with Alliance Tech Systems. In the two years since, revenue has gone from $700,000 to a little over $1 million, and the company now operates seven presses, ranging from 30 to 500 tons, employs seven people 24/7, and utilizes automation. Business runs the gamut from consumer products for Tupperware to missile components for the U.S. Dept. of Defense.
The company worked with the state of Maryland and the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) when it started out, which eventually led to the meetings with Maryland’s governor and the president, as the SBA’s Small Business Owner of the Year for the state, rewarding the entrepreneurial owners after they placed a sizable bet on themselves.
“We actually never used the SBA for money,” McGrath says, “we used them for advice and assistance. Steve and I, personally, when we started out, just put our two homes up for collateral.”
16. CPM Fastool
When Chesapeake Plastics’ Mark McGrath and Steven Moore launched their company from the remains of their former employer, business started strong with a base of former clients, but in 2004, the shop estimated that it lost $100,000 in contracts because of tooling lead times.
“Customers came to us and needed parts in 30 days,” McGrath says, “and we couldn’t do it, and they couldn’t get it overseas in time. We didn’t lose the jobs to competitors—they just died.”
Responding to market pull, McGrath, and Moore, whose background is in tooling, including journeyman moldmaker certification, sought out the latest in moldmaking at Plastec East (which is owned by MPW parent Canon Communications) and found the additive technology of Münich, Germany’s Electro Optical Systems (EOS) GmbH. The direct metal laser-sintering (DMLS) process could build cavities in the 30-day window, but the unit’s 200W laser was believed to create stresses that could lead to production failures.
McGrath and Moore, who are drag-racing enthusiasts, wondered if a cryogenic technology used to fortify high-duress racecar components could make for production-ready cavities. “What would happen if you put a high-stress part out of EOS into cryogenic?” Moore recalls asking. The company sent inserts to a cryogenic-unit specialist and created class 103 tools that could be used for 100,000 cycles. If a molder is running filled or flame-retardant materials, the company applies chromium nitride via sputtering for 100,000 cycles. The DMLS takes five days, and after 24 hours in a -300ºF cryogenic system, a complete tool with off-the-shelf M.U.D. bases can be ready in 14-21 days. Some $550,000 in new equipment later, CPM Fastool was born as a standalone company, with Moore as its lone employee.
“The machine is actually coming through on more promises than we thought it was going to,” Moore says. “We’ve gotten to the point that we’re quoting jobs that have 50,000 pieces and not even charging for the tool, which is on par with what overseas competition is doing.”
17. Elena Moreno
Environmental awareness and the problem of industry waste are close to the heart of 32-year-old industrial engineer Elena Moreno, managing director of blown-film processor Plásticos Hidrosolubles (Rafelbuñol, Spain). Like other industrial countries, Spain is confronted with increasing amounts of trash. Landfills are limited, incineration produces unwanted exhaust, and no one wants to be the neighbor of such facilities.
What to do? Moreno and a young team decided to start in 2005 their own blown-film operations to produce monolayer web processed from water-soluble and biodegradable polyvinyl alcohol (PVOH); the facility is unique in the country. PVOH, produced by polymerizing vinyl acetate monomers followed by hydrolysis of the resultant polyvinyl acetate, permits a variety of films targeting specific applications. Some are soluble in water at 10°C, others at 20°C, and for some applications Moreno says end-users need to have a stable film that won’t start to dissolve in water until it reaches 50°C.
The material provides good gas barrier properties as well. The 17-employee processing operation has a single blown-film line with an output of 100 kg/hr. Production occurs in three shifts around the clock, processing a range of six different monolayer films in thicknesses from 20-100 µm. The company trains its own apprentices.
The films are finding use as barrier layers in multilayer laminates to prevent oxygen ingress; as single-dose packaging for cleaning agents, dyes, and other products; laundry bags for clothing and for medical products that need to be incinerated; soft urns containing the ashes of a cremated body that is to be buried or interred at sea; and for some specialty embroidery applications where the water-soluble center layer dissolves in washing.
Despite its forward-looking production, Plásticos Hidrosolubles receives no government support. Has that made a difference to Moreno, a trained industrial engineer who previously worked for such companies as Pilkington Automotive and Accenture? Not a bit. “I found the idea of creating an operation to convert water-soluble plastics from the start brilliant,” she says. And she credits the support of her shareholders as making the whole dream possible.
18. Andreas Munkert
Taking over the direction of custom molder Gassmann Group (Obermichelbach, Germany) in 2006, Andreas Munkert has continued the firm’s traditions while also adding some new wrinkles, including an international presence. In 2006 the firm formed a joint venture, Gaba Plastics, in Nizn, Slovakia.
Munkert also has turned up the focus on the firm’s newest business, as an employee placement firm for plastics processors. Gassmann Innovations is the name of the placement operation, and Munkert’s firm has specialized in helping plastics processors find experienced employees, with an emphasis on placing workers over the age of 50 who otherwise often have difficulty getting re-hired.
The entry into personnel placement came about from Gassmann’s own difficulties in finding good help, an issue Munkert and his colleagues also heard about from neighboring firms. At the same time, a number of reports in Germany recently have highlighted the difficulties of workers in finding new employment after the age of 45-50, even though these workers can offer a wealth of experience.
Munkert’s also keen to keep his firm processing on plastics’ cutting edge, with one result offering financial support for a teaching position for plastics processing at the nearby University of Erlangen. The contact to the school was easily made—Munkert jogs mornings with his neighbor, Simon Amesöder, who also is lead engineer for plastics at the University. One of the first projects to arise from the cooperation between the University and Gassmann is for use of innovative thermoplastics in the production of Molded Interconnect Devices (MIDs).
19. Tadeusz Nowicki
Even as we published an article on developments at his cast-film extrusion business, Eurofilms, in our February 2007 issues, Tadeusz Nowicki was already making his next move, the “major announcement” he mentioned in that article. Nowicki now is merging his PVC extrusion business, Ergis, into Eurofilms, the smaller—but already publicly traded—cast-film extruder of stretch films as used to cover pallets and cases of packed goods. Nowicki currently serves as president of the management boards at both Ergis and Eurofilms, and directed Eurofilm’s own initial public offering (IPO) only last year.
The merger creates an even stronger, united regional plastics processor, with annual sales approaching ?87 million (about $118 million), and also gives Ergis greater access to funds without forcing the firm to go through the laborious and costly IPO process. Ergis is already Poland’s largest processor of PVC, including applications for the building and construction market as well as various packaging applications.
Ergis employs about 500, a number set to increase as it is in the process of acquiring flexible packaging processor and converter Drukaria BAAD. The acquisition adds another weapon to the Ergis Group companies’ plastics arsenal, as Drukaria is a specialist in flexographic printing. Eurofilms also is expanding its product portfolio, recently installing another extrusion line so that it this year can add extrusion of PET to its lineup of LLDPE and PVC films.
20. Francisco Amaury Olsen
Amaury Olsen is part of the Brazilian PVC industry’s old guard. He’s been at pipe and tubing extruder Tigre SA for more than 30 years, now serving as its president, and has seen the company transform from a small family-run operation into one of the largest PVC processors in Brazil. Olsen’s next challenge for the Joinville, Santa Catarina-based company is to expand its operations abroad. “Tigre’s growth strategy is very simple: New products, new business, and new markets,” Olsen said.
The company is expecting to see significant growth in the domestic market in 2007 as a result of a series of initiatives recently announced by the Brazilian government that should boost civil construction. “We are prepared to take advantage of this stronger demand,” said Olsen. Tigre is in the process of completing a new facility, located in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, one of the fastest growing regions of Brazil.
But the company also has big plans for the international market, which will bring new challenges for Olsen. Later this year, it will begin operations at its first site in the United States, which will be located in Janesville, WI. The company is also concluding the construction of a new facility in Quito, Ecuador, which should be operating by the third quarter. These new plants will add to the company’s international portfolio, which already includes production facilities in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
With the new investments, revenues from its overseas operations should increase to 40% of the company’s revenues from 20% by the end of the decade.
21. Richard Puglielli
Operating under the motto, “small enough to know you, big enough to serve you,” custom molder/moldmaker ProMold Plastics (Cromwell, CT) remains true to its credo and roots as a second-generation manufacturing firm pursuing smart growth. Coming off a record 2006, ProMold marks its 40th anniversary in 2007, with Richard Puglielli at the helm after taking over for his father, Riccardo Puglielli, in 1999. The senior Puglielli founded ProMold as a one-man tool-and-die shop in 1967 after emigrating from Italy.
In 2007, the company added eDart process-monitoring hardware and software from RJG (Traverse City, MI), to increase quality and repeatability.
In addition to overmolding, insert molding, and even metal injection molding, on presses ranging from 28 to 300 tons, ProMold offers assembly, decoration, and toolbuilding, with 3D machining and wire EDM (electrical discharge machining) for prototype and production molds. The company’s work, and its leader, have not gone unnoticed, with the SpeedBlocks head immobilizer device it molded for Laerdal Medical Design & Development Group winning a Medical Design Excellence Award at the June 2002 MD&M East show in New York City (MD&M East is run by MPW parent, Canon Communications), and the younger Puglielli being named to the 40 Under 40 list of the Hartford Business Journal in 2000. Son joined father at ProMold in 1990 after earning a degree in mechanical engineering. “When I first became president in the late ’90s, new opportunities for growth were limited,” Puglielli says. “Since then, we have been diligently working on and investing in building a new management infrastructure and acquiring state-of-the-art equipment to support the changing needs of the industry.”
In the nine years the younger Puglielli spent learning the ropes from his dad, he also contributed to the company’s future, helping introduce computers to ProMold and getting its ISO 9002 certification. It’s currently ISO 9001:2000 certified.
22. Arle Rawlings
The life of a custom molder is a roller coaster, full of ups and downs and little certainty. “Being a custom molder is a constant battle,” admits Arle Rawlings, CEO of Mastercraft Companies, consisting of Mastercraft Mold and Polycraft Industries. While Rawlings has won most of the battles in the company’s 39-year history, business hasn’t gotten any easier, he says, with the challenge of offshore competition—even on-shore competition—where piece-part price rules.
Mastercraft Companies grew out of Mastercraft Mold, started in 1968 as strictly a moldmaking company serving the injection molding industry. By the early 1980s, molding looked like a good business, so Rawlings purchased a couple of presses and formed Polycraft Industries, the molding arm of his business. The 1980s were good to Mastercraft and Polycraft, and by 1992, Mastercraft Companies had outgrown its small, leased space. Rawlings then purchased the company’s current site, a two-building complex that gives the company a 21,000-ft² facility for mold design, engineering and manufacturing, and a 37,000-ft² building for administrative offices and plastics processing.
Mastercraft’s primary market has been medical, including disposables, instrumentation, subassemblies, and EMI-shielded components. But, over the years the company has, like most custom molders, molded a whole variety of parts and products. Today, the company operates 30 injection molding presses from 40-440 tons, and likely will add a few electric presses this year.
The downturn of 2002-2003 took its toll on the company, but Rawlings and his staff, many of who have been with the company for 20-plus years, guided the business away from the rocks and kept it viable. While the company’s sales for 2006 were $8.7 million, down from $10.5 million in 2005, due to the relocation of a major molding project to be more geographically convenient for the customer, Rawlings isn’t daunted by the challenges of custom molding today. “We have to keep moving, finding new business, serving our long-time, loyal customers by producing the high-quality, precision components they’ve come to expect from us over the years.”
23. Sergey Stepanov and Craig McAllister
Starting from plans and a green field in 2005 was a challenge for both Sergey Stepanov, general director, and Craig McAllister, project manager, at a ?20 million, 8000m2 packaging processing facility in Gomel, Belarus, near the Ukrainian boarder. Part of the Alcopack group (Koblenz, Germany), this new facility concentrates on mono- and biaxially oriented polystyrene (OPS and BOPS) for packaging applications.
Stepanov’s background included being the first person to install and run a BOPP plant in Belarus in the pre-Perestroika days. Nevertheless, both he and McAllister were faced with having to train, from scratch, their processing crew. “That wasn’t all bad, however. Workers had no preconceptions and brought a fresh approach to the job,” says McAllister. “People in Belarus are very adaptable.”
Employees, he says, are proud to work at a plant that processes quality goods to Western European standards. Stepanov, who is also general director of Multipack, the packaging arm of Alcopack, brought in an administrative style quite unlike the former Soviet top-down management. A working culture based on team involvement has helped foster worker loyalty and helped the operation run smoothly from the start.
About 90% of the plant’s present BOPS output goes to Russia, where packagers are replacing PVC film and sheet with this material. OPS is produced on the same Brückner Maschinenbau line as BOPS, but using a different die. OPS targets markets such as window envelope film, protective shrink sleeves, and labels for beverage containers. The company is currently working with European PS suppliers to trial an inmold PS label for EPS cups as a replacement for polypropylene labels. The advantage is in recycling and quality graphics. Quality is the key that sells packaging products today in Russian and Eastern Europe, he says.
Not everything has gone according to plan, however. When the plant opened, energy costs were about 30% lower than they are now, since gas suppliers in Russia dramatically upped the price. Alcopack is also feeling the pressure of low- cost oriented film imports from Latin America, says McAllister. The biggest problem facing the company is logistics, since the distance to customers is often huge, he says.
The Gomel plant, as a private enterprise, contributes to a number of activities including the country’s Olympic sports fund as well as local community projects. Next on the calendar is a decision as to how the company should expand. The plant is large enough for a second tenter frame but management still needs to look at what product range will be in most demand. It is currently doing trials with polylactic acid polymer (PLA) as oriented film, says McAllister.
24. Rob Tracy
For the 310 employees at Intek Plastics (Hastings, MN), a profile extruder and subassembly fabricator, lean manufacturing and value-added products are watchwords. Company CEO Rob Tracy (right, with VP manufacturing Kevin Lillo) says the company concentrates on serving medium- to large-sized industrial OEMs.
The processor co- and tri-extrudes custom profiles from vinyl, polypropylene, ABS, and thermoplastic elastomers for a wide variety of applications in the construction, appliance, telecommunications, transport, point-of-purchase, and recreation sectors.
One of its latest developments is helping to curb bone-rattling board crashes for members of the U.S. National Hockey League (NHL). Working together with rink-supply provider Athletica (Minneapolis, MN), Intek came up with SoftCap, a flexible cover extruded from Santoprene thermoplastic elastomer. It is fitted on top of rink dasher boards and the design uses hollow channels to absorb impact claimed to be 96% better than the material previously used, according to NHL tests.
Growth is a big part of Intek’s strategy. The family-owned company recently signed a letter of intent to be acquired by a private investment group, Private Equity Capital (Westport, CT), in order to help finance what Tracy says is “rapid but controlled” expansion. The company is tied to a large extent to the building and construction markets and the $58 million/yr sales company wants to diversify so it is less at the mercy of downward business cycles in the future. It also hopes export markets play an expanded role.
Tracy says Intek’s customers today are expecting ready-to-use products. They are moving away from internal assembly operations supplied by a wide variety of vendors to completed assemblies in staged deliveries from fewer suppliers. Intek, the winner of the Midsize Manufacturer Award from the Manufacturer’s Alliance, says this is where it stands out.
Not only has the company won this peer-award respect, but its employees appear to have high regard for the way the company operates. When two employees and U.S. National Guard members, Ron Pommerening and Jason Podritz, were ordered to active duty in Iraq, a group of fellow workers raised more than $3000 to help their families, with Intek management matching the contributions 2:1. The funds were used to purchase GPS and laptops to help the families stay in contact while the two were overseas. The company provided additional supplies to help make last Christmas a little cheerier for the families.
Upon returning to Minnesota, Pommerening and Podritz nominated Intek to receive the National Guard’s Employer Patriot Award, which Intek was awarded for helping to keep the soldiers motivated during their time away.
25. Vaupell Industrial
Leonard Vaupell founded Vaupell Industrial Plastics in Seattle, WA, in June 1947, with the intention of supplying plastics components to the new but growing commercial airplane market. In 1948, Vaupell supplied the very first plastic parts to Boeing. He sold the company in 1978 and it began to expand its geographic and marketing objectives. As a result, Vaupell Industrial Plastics evolved into a world leader in the molding and assembly of plastics components, using advanced engineering resins such as Ultem, Radel, and PEEK. This year, the company is celebrating 60 years as a primary supplier of highly cosmetic parts and assemblies to the aircraft industry.
In 1998, Vaupell was acquired by HIG Capital, a leading private equity firm. This led in 2004 to the acquisition of the SciTech Plastics group, and Vaupell Group was formed. According to Joe Jahn, president and CEO of Vaupell (pictured), this gave the company its introduction to the medical market, and provided a means to expand on new and exciting technologies. “We recognized that Seattle would remain our aerospace center of excellence,” said Jahn, “but the concentration of four medical plants in Massachusetts brought the opportunity to consolidate our medical expertise into one building. So during 2005, we transferred our activities into a new facility in Agawam, MA, and today we have a world-class operation, with molding and assembly in Class 7 and 8 Clean Rooms, among the largest in the Northeast.”
“At the same time we recognized the great significance of our company in Constantine, MI, where we stand among a very select number of molders that make implant and reabsorbable materials. We are certified to ISO 13485:2003 in Constantine, and will achieve the same certification in Agawam in 2007,” Jahn added.
In addition to its custom business, Vaupell also has two proprietary businesses, Golston Product Solutions and AntiWave Pool Products, both in Sanger, TX. The latest addition to Vaupell’s capabilities is a joint venture concluded in September 2006 with an established moldmaking and molding company in Shenzhen, China. Vaupell hopes eventually expand the Shenzhen operation to a full-service supplier for the aerospace and automotive markets in that region. | 
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