I visited The Protomold Company for the first time on July 27, 2006. The company is in the business of making aluminum molds and molding plastic parts. The 4,645 square meter (50,000 square foot) headquarters operation in Maple Plain, Minnesota was even more extraordinary than I had expected. I met with Brad Cleveland, chief executive officer, Larry Lukis, chief technical officer and founder, Mark Kubicek, vice president of operations, and Don Krantz, vice president of development. These individuals form the management team.
The company is known for its quick delivery at affordable prices. Standard lead time is 10-15 business days, from the receipt of 3D CAD data to shipped molded parts. For a 25% premium, delivery is <10 days. Customers can cut it to five days for a 50% premium. And, when paying a 100% premium, delivery is three days. To meet the demand, the company runs five shifts around the clock, seven days a week.
Protomold quotes more jobs each day than I would have ever imagined. The company’s primary intellectual property is its mostly automated tool design software and its quoting engine. These tools, as well as everything else associated with the day-to-day operation, is totally paperless. After I was made aware of this, I kept an eye out, expecting to see at least a scrap of paper somewhere, but I did not. Impressive discipline!
In seven years, Protomold has grown every quarter except for one. About a year ago, the company was acknowledged nationally as the 96th fastest-growing private U.S. company on the Inc. 500 list. The company has received other awards and recognitions for its growth and business practices and is clearly serving a genuine need here in the U.S. and abroad. If the company continues to “get it right” as it has in the recent past, it can expect a bright and prosperous future.
INCS Inc. of Tokyo, Japan is a fascinating company in the product development and manufacturing business. It can produce precision tooling with multiple side actions, as well as molded parts the size of a mobile phone, in an unbelievable 45 hours. That’s right: less than two days. Sound impossible? The company has developed special tool design software, CNC machining software, and CNC machining centers to help streamline the process. These tools contribute to the unprecedented speeds, but it’s the company’s proprietary set of processes that makes it so highly efficient.
Shinjiro Yamada, the brains behind the operation, is the CEO of INCS. He is a highly respected individual and has a reputation for pioneering impressive new methods of product design and manufacturing. I’ve had the privilege of knowing Mr. Yamada for more than a decade and have watched him build INCS from a small startup to a corporation that now employs hundreds of talented individuals. The average age of an INCS employee is 27.
The injection molds are made of tool steel or aluminum, depending upon the required part quantity. Maximum part size is 300 x 300 x 100 mm (12 x 12 x 4 inches). The company’s 50 custom-built CNC machines are capable of milling slots as thin as 0.5 mm (0.020 inch) for ribs and other features, so no electrical discharge machining (EDM) is required for most jobs.
It is important to note that the company requires more than two days if it is producing multiple molds as part of a single job and shipping the molded parts to customers in the U.S. or Europe. Within two weeks (from CAD data to delivery), INCS can deliver the first parts, including up to 20 different types of components at the same time. That means receiving CAD data for 20 different parts, producing molds, and delivering the parts—all within a two-week time-frame. If you know of a company that can do it faster, let me know.
MecSoft Corporation recently announced the availability of its VisualMill Basic 4.0 product for $550. The product is also being bundled with Rhino from Robert McNeel & Associates for $995. These are two excellent products with a loyal customer base. VisualMill Basic offers 3-axis, solids, surface, and STL milling and includes DXF, IGES, and other CAD imports, as well as a configurable post processor.
Bill Morgan of Vintage Industries has used VisualMill to machine more than 150 molds. He exports STL files from his CAD software and imports them into Magics Tooling for the creation of mold data. He then imports the STL data into VisualMill and machines it. He previously used MasterCAM but found VisualMill to be easier to use and more productive. Morgan said that he routinely produces precision data with resolution of up to 0.0025 mm (0.0001 inch) from STL models.
Products such as PowerMILL from Delcam, Surfcam from Surfware, and DeskProto from Delft Spline Systems also import STL data.
