MMT Chats: Taking a Holistic Approach to Mold Building with a Focus on Efficiency

With a focus on educating new and existing customers about Roembke Mfg & Design’s capabilities, this business development manager works with the team to establish partnerships to develop new technologies that improve customers’ efficiency.

Here are just a few tidbits from this conversation to whet your appetite for our full conversation:

• Roembke has been in business since 1977. It started as a small shop with about 10 employees and today we have 75 employees in about 75,000 square feet. We offer everything from quick prototypes to complete turnkey systems for everything from natural rubber to silicones thermoplastics for medical, automotive and general consumer products.
• Roembke was a rubber molding company that expanded into thermoplastics over the past 10 years or so due to customer demands.
• Its years in business is a competitive advantage, along with the company’s ability to retain employees. The average tenure of employees is over 20 years. It’s rare they come across a project that someone on the floor hasn't seen before.
• They own 14 presses — LSR, thermoplastics and transfer presses. They test every mold before sending it out to the customer.
• They do not make parts and compete with our customers, but they do pre-production, runoffs and testing.
• They don't shy away from any projects. They make it work — whether it's 128-drop valve-gated cold deck system or a true two shot system. The team is experienced in making challenging geometries and holding tight tolerances.
• They view every project as a partnership with the customer.
• They take a holistic approach and think about everything that's going to happen over the life of that mold.  They are not just making a mold and shoving it out there and then moving on to the next project.
• Recently invested in a couple of five-axis machines because they had a couple of projects that really needed them for some complex contours, and now the team is finding other ways to use them.
• They design all cold deck systems in the house. They own the designs and proprietary.
• The application techs continually offer feedback to improve their cold decks to make life easier for the operators, which spills over to their customers.
• Their quick prototype system (QPS) is unique to Roembke. It's a true production equivalent system. It's made the same way that they make a production tool out of hardened steel. In theory, you can take the cavity stack out of the quick prototype system and put it into a production mold.
• They are trying to learn all they can about how the parts really run and how the automation is going to work.
• A quick mold change project with Engel revealed new efficiencies while customers try to do more with fewer employees. This QPS saves a lot of time. It cuts down on mistakes that techs make while setting up a mold, hooking up hoses, etc.
• “We are just trying to eek out a little more efficiency.”
• “It doesn't seem like a lot when you're doing mold changes, but if a mold change takes an hour and you're doing that twice a day, this system can cut it down to 5 or 10 minutes. You can really squeeze out a lot more cycles.”
• When they started doing complete turnkey systems about five years ago, they knew they had to grow their partnerships with the press manufacturers.
• “It makes sense for all of us to collaborate.”

For the full quick chat, watch above, and for more MMT Chats, click here.

This episode is brought to you by ISCAR with New Ideas for Machining Intelligently.