VIDEO: The Importance of Facility and Flow to Mold Repair and Engineering Changes

United Tool and Mold Owner Scott Phipps speaks with MoldMaking Technology Editorial Director Christina Fuges about its new 60,000-square-foot facility dedicated to large mold repair and engineering changes, which has improved the company's competitiveness and their future plans for growth and improvement.

Here is a video and transcript of the interview: 

At United Tool The more we keep the plastic industry up and running. No matter how big they get or what size they need, we're going to meet their demands. United Tool and Mold has no boundaries. We've taken on a rhino mentality, not a cow mentality grazing in a field behind a fence. We go beyond and charge forward at all time. The culture has developed and they can do anything. And we'll take on anything with a damn the torpedoes attitude.

United Tool & Mold started in 1995, focusing on repair and engineering changes to service the plastic injection mold market. The focus on repair and engineering change comes from the demand of the customers because they were building them up north and in the south and there weren't any large tool shops. The focus for us was to get to where we could handle originally with twenty five tons, but today we handle 50 to 60 tons.

Back in the early days, we were servicing the container industry, skids, Paxton, returnable packaging and plastic containers. We started servicing globally in the late 90s and early 2000s with the service of the global market the demand was even higher. That pushed us on up into getting to the very large tools to land them and get them pushed in and get them through to get our customers up and running.

The new facility gave us the advantage of wiping the slate clean and bringing everything we did in all the other three facilities underneath one roof with all the best ideas. From laser welding, laser engraving, laser scanning our app systems that follows the tool from the beginning from pickup to the end, to our ERP system, communication to the central hub where our purchasing is in the center of our facility and all of our engineering is driven from the center out.

So with the focus on the new building being a drive through because we do 50 to 60 job a week, the crane capacity and the ability to load and unload molds on and off the trucks helps divide and create a barrier between us and our competition. With the ability to add on forty more thousand feet to the building, we see that one day we might need to go to a 100 ton cranes. Cars are only going to get bigger. The parts are only going to get bigger. Everything is going to keep growing.

They've got to make cars lighter and lighter. Frames are going to become more and more plastic or composite and body parts are going to be more and more one piece to get strength in them, causing the molds to be larger and larger. So with larger molds requires people to service larger, tools. And we have service guys on the road that service these so we don't have to move them, but when we have to move them, we've got to be able to handle them with the equipment we got.

For more on UTM, listen to the MMT/The Manufacturing Alliance Podcast.