MGS invests in health care production

MGS Manufacturing Group Inc. is ramping up full-scale production in a newly equipped 15,000-square-foot ISO Class 8 clean room in a Germantown, Wis., molding facility.

The room will house a total of 25 injection molding machines of 300 to 460 tons and was created initially to meet the large-scale production needs of a particular customer in the health care and medical device markets.

MGS invested more than $4 million on renovations, more than $7 million on new injection molding machines and nearly $5 million on auxiliary equipment, Paul Manley, chief financial officer and chief operating officer, said in a statement.

Once fully equipped, the room is scheduled eventually to produce more than 2 billion single-use plastic components annually for drug delivery and diagnostic devices for as many as six customers. Projected annual resin consumption is expected to hit 7.5 million pounds of PVC and 1.2 million pounds of polypropylene.

MGS will ship the manufactured parts to customer facilities in North America, Europe and Asia for final assembly and/or packaging.

MGS has 15 injection molding machines in the clean room, plans to add four more in May and June, and add the final six during the last half of 2016. The new presses are primarily KraussMaffei servo hydraulic hybrids along with several Arburg machines.

Paul Caprio, president of KraussMaffei Corp., said his firm's hybrid technology saves energy, operates quieter and is becoming more popular with customers.

“Over recent years, the hydraulic folks have combined their technology with servo motors,” Caprio said. “We are not limiting or giving up technical capabilities on the machine side, and we can do bigger mold sizes.”

Motan Inc. supplied a highly automated custom-designed material handling system with a central delivery system that is positioned on a mezzanine outside the clean room to dry and condition materials. The system includes barcode scanning to ensure effective communication of correct parameters to the molding machines, high efficiency particulate arresting filtration on the drying system and other filtration on the conveying side.

“We configured the systems in a way to address their concerns and manufacturing process,” said Scott Harris, vice president of sales for Motan. A LINKnet interface simplifies control of operating, supervising, reporting and archiving functions.

In addition to the Motan system, other auxiliary equipment includes three automated assembly systems, Wittmann W833 and W823D computer numerical control robots and MAC Automation Concepts Inc. conveyors.

The new clean room is the second Class 8 “facility within a facility” space in the 180,000-square-foot MGS Germantown molding facility.

MGS's first clean room there occupies 6,250 square feet, went into operation in mid-2010 and now uses 10 Arburg and KraussMaffei presses and two MGS-built automated assembly systems for making parts and assemblies for drug delivery devices and diagnostics consumables.

The newest improved area previously housed three bays of injection molding machines making products typically for automotive, electronics, consumer, industrial or health care applications. Without interrupting production, MGS moved the existing programs and 24 single-shot and multishot presses of 80-250 tons to other areas of the Germantown facility or other MGS molding plants.

In making improvements, MGS also expanded its warehouse and distribution capacities. Originally, about 30,000 square feet of the Germantown molding plant served as a warehouse for resin storage, packaging inventory and production mold storage.

For the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, privately held MGS reported sales of about $209 million. The health care industry accounted for 45 percent of the total sales from the firm's molding, tooling and equipment services groups.

In addition to Germantown, MGS has manufacturing facilities in Libertyville and Antioch, Ill.; Buffalo, N.Y.; Chihuahua, Mexico; and Leixlip, Ireland, with a total of more than 270 injection molding presses of 28-1,400 tons.