Following the recent expansion and renovation of several plants, precision molder MedPlast Inc. now has a capacity “far more suited to what we need to do, all of it focused on clean room capacities,” President and CEO Harold Faig said.
The company recently upgraded facilities in its home base of Tempe, Ariz., as well as in West Berlin, N.J., and Westfield, Pa.
“We now have in excess of 250 injection molding, compressed presses, rubber molding and liquid injection molding machines,” Faig said in an April 13 telephone interview.
In addition, he said MedPlast had solidified its relationship with medical design firm, HS Design Inc. of Gladstone, N.J., so that it can now better capitalize on the firm's design capabilities.
“We weren't utilizing their capabilities,” even though MedPlast has owned an undisclosed minority equity stake in HS Design for the past year, Faig said. “We had no synergies” with them, he said.
But since the beginning of the year, HS Design and MedPlast have integrated their marketing efforts and the two companies have become full business partners, Faig said.
“A lot of our customers are looking for more than contract manufacturing,” he said. “They want to put more into design work and more into design for manufacturing. The folks at HS Design have a lot of industrial design, engineering and process abilities we can draw on, prior to mold design.
“We can now present more of a unified effort to our customers and get in on the early stages of product development.”
HS Design has six industrial designers, four mechanical engineers, eight seats of Solidworks computer-aided-design software and two seats of ProEngineer CAD software, which Faig said “covers most of the design platforms in the medical industry.”
All five MedPlast plants are now ISO 13485-compliant, Faig said, and the company has incorporated good manufacturing processes and Six Sigma into its manufacturing operations, training 12 black belts and 30 green belts. “Our processes now mirror those of our customers,” he said.
Faig said the company turned a molding center at its Westfield plant into a white room with Class 10,000 capabilities and expanded its West Berlin mold-manufacturing facility, adding high-speed numerically controlled machining centers, robotic tool-changing capabilities and 10-15 machines as part of a white room expansion.
West Berlin is now one of the largest two-shot molding plants for the medical industry, molding soft materials on top of rigid materials, Faig said. The factory specializes in multishot and overmolded applications for the health-care and other select industrial markets.
He said the Tempe plant renovation, also completed in March, added a 20,000-square-foot white room and a 20,000-square-foot clean room to serve medical customers on the West Coast.
MedPlast was founded in April 2008 through the acquisitions of the Engineered Rubber and Plastics Group of Applied Tech Products Corp. and K&W Medical Specialties of Westfield, Pa. It has five sites with 375,000 square feet of manufacturing space and employs 800.
About 70 percent of MedPlast's business is in medical devices, focusing largely on hand-held, single-use surgical instruments, drug-delivery devices and diagnostic devices — products geared to its capabilities in rubber, plastics and silicone, as well as its overmolding and two-shot molding capacities.