Technical Precision Plastics growing in US, Dominican Republic

Technical Precision Plastics Inc. is boosting its capacity, adding 8,000 square feet of Class 8 clean room molding space in Mebane, N.C., and nearly doubling the size of its facility in the Dominican Republic.

President Jim Piermarini and business development manager Jim Corrado detailed the company's expansion plans recently during a teleconference with Plastics News.

“We've got a great team — they are really dedicated and very professional. There's a lot of longevity and very low turnover,” said Jim Piermarini, detailing the reason for the company's success over the past 30 years.

Technical Precision Plastics was founded in 1984, according to Piermarini, by four people with injection molding experience who leased 10,000 square feet of space. They used a Small Business Association loan plus an equipment loan from Milacron to get started.

The company now operates 38 molding machines at two locations in Mebane, as well as eight presses in its Haina, Dominican Republic facility.

Piermarini said a large part of the company's business is in the medical field and that they are enlarging one of its two Class 8 clean rooms to offer more capacity. They also have a Class 7 clean room for assembly work.  The company is looking to add three more all-electric machines.

He and Corrado said strong customer service and expertise in two- and three-shot molding has fueled the increase in business.

As an example, he cited a situation where the company worked with medical start-up to redesign a product for easier manufacturing. He said that after prototyping and testing, they ended up replacing a thermoset rubber with a thermoplastic elastomer. They also designed a multi-shot component that eliminated the parting line of the TPE sealing surface. Piermarini said the return on investment of over $1 million in tooling and assembly equipment was achieved in less than a year.

He said that the Dominican facility opened five years ago to handle business for the island and that they are finding markets opening elsewhere in the Caribbean.

The Dominican expansion is underway with the size of the building going from 10,000 to 20,000 square feet. It is scheduled to be completed in the next 60 days.  The company is adding two Milacron Roboshot presses — 165 and 330 tons — and is expanding its tool shop.

Piermarini also noted that community involvement is important to the company. In North Carolina, it will be sponsoring its 15th consecutive golf tournament, which raises more than $15,000 annually for various charities.