Plastic injection molding is a modern manufacturing method that’s popular thanks to its cost-effectiveness at high volumes and tailor-made solutions for design problems. It’s also highly customizable to deliver your unique product specifications and requirements. The custom injection molding process uses plastic resins or polymers heated, melted and injected into custom molds under high pressure to produce products that precisely meet your project demands.
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While this manufacturing process may sound simple, you need a custom injection molding partner that understands and caters to your needs and specifications. The perfect partner may not exist, but you can assess custom injection molding manufacturers on a few key factors to understand if they’re the right fit for you.
1. Production Volume and Capacity Specification
There are two main types of custom injection molding manufacturers who have the skills and equipment to produce different volumes of plastic parts:
- Low to medium-volume molders: These molders specialize in producing 10,000 parts or less. They’re suitable for businesses looking for parts in small volumes, such as the agriculture, medical and aerospace industries. You should also consider molders in this category if you want to create prototypes for testing or bridge the gap between small production units for market testing and full-production tooling.
- High-volume molders: These molders produce injection molded parts in runs in the hundreds of thousands to millions. They should be your ideal choice if you want to produce parts in bulk.
A company’s machine size and number determine its production capacity. Injection machine size is expressed as tonnage and the higher the tonnage, the larger and higher the complexity of parts it can manufacture. However, the best custom injection molding companies specialize in high and low volumes because they can accommodate your product changes.
2. Specific Product Application
The intended use of the part you’re producing through custom injection molding determines the best manufacturer because they use different designs, materials and production techniques. Your product application also dictates the development and production process the molders use to deliver the parts according to your specifications.
Establish the type of plastic resin the manufacturer uses and its suitability to both your product’s end use and your budget. The molding material is another important consideration — steel molds, for example, are ideal for large and long-term production, while aluminum works best for small and short-term production.
Your partner should be able to produce your custom injection molded parts to specification. They should also have the skills, experience and knowledge to make strong recommendations that may save you time and money without sacrificing quality
3. List of Value-Added Services
The best custom injection molding companies should be able to do more than produce parts from your design prototypes. They need to offer you valuable advice on how to ensure the parts are produced to geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) standards, undercuts, draft angles and material selection to guarantee the project’s success. Additionally, they should utilize their knowledge to clearly explain the advantages and disadvantages of different options, such as injection molding gates.
Mold flow analysis is another value-added service offered by reliable molders to determine potential design issues and improve part quality and performance. Generally, a full-service plastic injection molding partner offers prototyping, part design, mold flow analysis and quick response manufacturing to deliver decided cost and tie efficiencies.
4. Quality and On-Time Deliveries
In manufacturing, sticking to deadlines and delivering quality are non-negotiable requirements. To ensure your plastic custom injection molded parts are produced and delivered on time, you need to communicate your expectations with your manufacturer.
Assess your manufacturers’ production processes to understand how efficient they are and verify they can deliver within your timelines. It also helps to ascertain whether they can deliver products that meet your quality standards. Any reputable custom plastic injection molding company has an in-house quality assurance team that oversees the entire process to prevent quality compromises. They should also be certified by the International Organization for Standards (ISO) to verify their commitment to using the production techniques.
Some essential standards for plastic injection molding companies are AS and ISO , which provide them with an approach to achieve effective quality management. Polycraft Products is an ISO -certified company with industry-leading delivery times and quality standards and committed to process improvements. You can count on our team to create effective custom injection molded parts and solve complex problems using the latest technologies, such as laser scanners and touch and visual CMMs.
5. Pricing
Custom injection molding costs vary greatly depending on the production volume, simplicity or complexity of molds, the size of the mold and materials used for plastic production and mold making. Before settling on a manufacturer, you should assess quotes from several to find one that delivers your project within your budget without compromising on quality.
When requesting quotes, provide manufacturers with a complete summary of your project to ensure you get the total pricing without incurring costly surprises later. In the quotes, look out for any hidden charges and request a detailed description of payment terms so you can plan accordingly.
Avoid running for the cheapest quote because it directly reflects the value of molds and services you sign up for. It could also indicate long or inaccurate lead times — time is money, and confidence in a finished product’s delivery date is essential. With plastic mold injection service, it’s mostly worth paying more if it guarantees precision, good design, high-quality material selection and whether or not the manufacturer offers on-time delivery.
Contact Polycraft Products for Precise Custom Injection Molding Services
Are you looking for a custom injection molding company that ticks all the boxes? Polycraft Products fits the bill perfectly. We’re a full-service molding company that’s been in operation since , consistently delivering efficiency, high quality and safety. Our experienced team is knowledgeable and well-equipped to form plastics and resins in any shape or size using our turnkey injection molds, and we offer industry-leading delivery times.
We work closely with customers to understand your needs so we can develop effective custom injection molded parts that accurately meet your specifications and requirements. You can count on us to provide advice and valuable recommendations at all stages of the process, from concept design to production.
Purchasing injection-molded components is a major undertaking. And choosing an injection molding supplier can be nerve-racking. Suppliers have different processes,
protocols, and communication styles.
What are you looking for in a plastic injection molding partner? What are your expectations for quality, timing of delivery, technology, production capabilities, financial health, and a continuation plan?
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All of these are considerations when looking to deliver a project on time and within your budget.
Some partners, such as Crescent Industries, have evolved the capacity to offer post-processing operations to help manage the complete supply chain. This full-service approach can provide design, mold build, molding, secondary operations, and inventory management to help ensure on-time and on-budget delivery.
Choosing a supplier is not simply a matter of choosing the lowest number from a series of estimates. It’s important to dig down into the core competencies of the potential partner and understand if they can handle a project from cradle to grave and beyond.
One of the biggest issues in the injection molding industry — for molders and customers alike — is evaluating the total cost of ownership throughout the lifetime of a project. That means understanding the difference between being price conscious and cost conscious.
It’s important to understand your needs and to plan for the future. For example, one OEM chose a supplier for an initial prototyping and short-run production. But once the production demand increased, the supplier could not support the required high-volume production due to capacity and resource restraints. They had to move the tools to a supplier who could handle these high-volume orders. On the other end of the spectrum, another customer incurred steep setup fees without understanding that they had chosen a supplier that only did high-volume production.
You are not just choosing a supplier; you are choosing a manufacturing partner.
In cases where budget and delivery problems occurred in a plastic injection molding project, it’s often true that these problems could have been prevented during the partner selection process. These problems include:
- Compromised quality
- Unpredictable lead and delivery times
- Gaps in capability
There are a number of qualities that plastic injection molding manufacturers can demonstrate to show that they are best qualified to avoid these problems.
Quality
Customers seeking a plastic injection molding partner can ask for a number of assurances about the quality of the work. Injection molding providers can prove their ability to meet quality standards by showing potential customers that they have:
- Adequate traceability from resin raw material to the finished product
- Quality certifications and protocols that are needed for your industry segment
- The ability to track scrap to achieve a quality KPI
- A robust molding process that is approved during the mold-building process
- An excellent quality inspection lab (team)
- Industry 4.0 technology that monitors the injection molding process on all machines live on the production floor
- Demonstrated success in the market
Timeliness
A qualified partner should have a process for communicating timelines that involves an initial agreement between customer and manufacturer about timelines and expectations. Procurement challenges do occur, but advance planning reduces these challenges. In plastics, procurement of raw materials (resins and compounds) can take 6 to 16 weeks or more, depending on disruptions in the supply chain like weather-related disasters and global events.
Injection molders also meet expectations of timeliness through transparency in their forecast of the entire process and through supply chain management practices. Some specific ways they achieve on-time delivery include:
- Providing mold design, fabrication, qualification, and production in-house: Providing these services in-house cuts down dramatically on the time that would be required to have the project transported and processed elsewhere.
- Using Kanban (just-in-time) shipping technology to track and maintain inventory levels.
- Using Focused Factory work cells: Studies have shown that the physical time of manufacturing the product is only 5-12% of the total lead time in a project. Using the Focus Factory strategy, manufacturers can optimally manage time, organizational structure, system dynamics, and time-based management principles in all parts of the organization.
- Using blanket purchase orders rather than waiting for a new P.O. in cases where purchases are recurring or when changes need to be made in dollar amounts, quantities, goods and services, and/or the maximum order.
Capability
Does the partner you are considering have the production capabilities for your project?
In short, your partner must have the equipment to perform the job, provide facilities that are modern and well maintained, and have a plant designed for efficient workflow with flexible manufacturing systems. They should perform process monitoring, scientific injection molding, and decoupled molding to ensure that the best manufacturing process is performed.
Your partner should have demonstrated success in designing and fabricating injection molds. They should be equipped with both horizontal and vertical molding presses, depending on your project needs. In addition, they should offer the highest level of standards for certification and decoupled molding processes.
Finally, the financial health of the company is an essential indicator of capability. A potential partner should be able to demonstrate proven success in overseeing operations, such as forecasting into the next quarter, and conducting inventory forecasts. A financially healthy partner not only has all of the equipment, processes, and personnel to complete your job, but has the capacity to acquire assets that will make your job run with optimal quality and efficiency.
Case Study: Finding the Right Injection Molding Partner Solves 3 Key Challenges
“We were looking to find a partner that could support our company’s entry into the biopharmaceutical market and also a partner that met all of the technical requirements for manufacturing molded parts for that market.” — Pharmaceutical Executive
Technical Challenges
A pharmaceutical company was seeking a partner to support entry into the biopharmaceutical market. They engaged a procurement specialist to research vendors. “We were looking to find a partner that met all of the technical requirements for manufacturing molded parts for that market,” an executive reports.
This company had the following criteria:
- Molded parts needed to be manufactured in an ISO Class & Clean Room.
- The supplier needed to be certified for manufacturing to the ISO Medical Devices Standard.
- The molding tools needed to be manufactured in the United States.
Design Challenges
The customer was seeking to stay with their total budget for three tools with multiple variations of the parts. This presented a significant budget hurdle, but Crescent Industries met the challenge by building injection molding tool sets with removable cavities that would utilize their Master Frame bases to house their tools during production runs.
Timing Challenges
The supplier needed to support a schedule to design and fabricate tooling and produce initial injection-molded parts with a quick turnaround. The solution to this problem was
- Working with a partner that could design and fabricate in-house
- Working with a partner that manufactured tools in the United States to avoid long transportation line times and the risk of shipping delays.
