Plastocon keeps focus on customers, employees

Every morning, John Peyton starts his day the same way: checking on the customers.

Peyton, vice president of sales at Oconomowoc, Wis.-based injection molder Plastocon Inc., said he checks on quotes, samples, responses, meetings, "you name it."

"Everybody is involved in customer service in this company. It comes in different forms, obviously. But the customer is key here for us," he said. "We continue to promote that and help people understand how their job and their role can affect and help us and, in the long run, help the customers."

Even with the economic downtown nearly a decade ago, Peyton said Plastocon was able to survive and keep up.

"We continue to have growth even throughout this economy — year after year growth. I think that's significant, along with the profits that go along with that," Peyton said. "We continue to, year after year, reinvest more money than the previous year back into the company."

So, what's their secret? Plastocon President Joe Chmielewski credits the company's focus.

"We are focused on the employees of Plastocon [and] on our customers," Chmielewski said. "With the customer focus, we have come to the realization some years ago that we are not a job shop anymore. … We currently view ourselves as an extension of our customers' manufacturing capabilities or assembly capabilities. We do everything we can to be prepared for when they need product, whatever that means. It may mean inventorying raw materials. It may mean inventorying finished product. But that's kind of how we view ourselves. That's been one of the catalysts to our growth."

"I have to concur with that, that we're an extension of our customers," Peyton said. "It's more than just a phrase here. I think I said it, when [Chmielewski] got involved in this company and the ownership in 2001, we made a significant change. It has evolved very much into that way of thinking, and it permeates throughout the whole organization that it is our way of thinking."

Plastocon dates back to the late 1950s, Chmielewski said: "I think we were making buttons at that point in time." But ownership shifted in early 2001, when then-owner and President Ed Schams, who had owned Plastocon since 1986, sold the company to then-Vice President of Finance Joe Chmielewski and then-Vice President of Sales Jim Nurmi. Chmielewski bought out his partner in 2008.

"When Joe got involved in the business, things began to change. We started looking at things at little bit differently with our customers," Peyton said. "We started viewing ourselves and offering ourselves as plastics experts and the ability to help customers with their plastics needs, not just from a procurement standpoint, but with things like new product development and problem-solving and field issues and on and on."

When Chmielewski started at Plastocon, its meal-delivery system part of the business made up 20 percent. And when the company was sold to Chmielewski and Nurmi in 2001, its line of proprietary food trays and its related items for prisons were its fastest-growing part of the business, according to an item in Plastics News from that time. Plastocon was only "one of two suppliers of trays," Chmielewski said, and the company previously provided 40 percent of the injection molded plastic food trays to prisons in the United States.

But now, he said, "we're one of a dozen."

"Both John and I, our expertise is in injection molding. The meal-delivery piece of the business has continued to shrink over the years because some of those items have become commodity items," Chmielewski said. "Really, our focus is on the custom injection molding and associated assembly."

At the end of 2016, the company added six dryers and three new Cincinnati presses, for a total of 36 presses ranging from 50-850 tons in its 60,000-square-foot facility.

The new equipment has fit into its current space — thanks to a recently rearranged manufacturing floor — but Chmielewski said the company would eventually like to expand. Plastocon has an additional three acres that it is thinking about "maybe building a warehouse and moving more presses into our existing warehouse," he added.

"The facility is set up that all of the support equipment — the chillers and all of that — are centrally located in the manufacturing center. Quite frankly, we have at least, in the building that we're in, the potential for close to double where we're at today," Peyton said. "I'm not sure that strategically we would pursue that; we might just go another location. When you get too big at one facility, it's too hard to manage. We've done a good job of buying up the properties required around us; we're nowhere near landlocked by any means."

Chmielewski said Oconomowoc is "a wonderful place to do business," naming its "great labor pool" and "committed employees" as major reasons. "Lots of good resources, natural resources here," Peyton added.

In terms of the company's future, Chmielewski said Plastocon is looking to continue the profitability and sales growth it's had, "in the 10 to 15 percent range," as well as continue its customer relations "in terms of quality, on-time delivery and basically serving their needs."

He added that marketing the business and appealing to a new generation are also on the agenda.

"We are looking at presenting ourselves to the world a little differently," Chmielewski said. "We've got some younger employees and, while we have a wonderful staff of seasoned employees and very knowledgeable employees, we recognize that in order to keep the business going, we also need to be able to attract younger employees. We're looking at those fresh ideas and things like logos to keep us going. … That's another thing: Job shops, historically, never really thought of themselves as needing marketing. That's obviously not true."

Chmielewski added that it has been adding new positions, including "three or four Plastocon employees over the last six months."

"We have had to increase our technical people to cover these materials," Peyton said. "Additionally, because of the growth … our support people, customer service and engineering and those things also had to be added to some degree."

They employ "roughly about 75, and then we have about 55 temporary help," Chmielewski said, adding that Plastocon was the first company in the Milwaukee-Waukesha area to be ISO-certified.

"We were heavily involved in lean manufacturing as lean was being developed," he added. "This new realization about the job shop, I think we've been at the forefront of some of those movements, which has helped us as a company."

What excites him about the future, he said, is the limitlessness of what plastics can do.

"The exciting part, to me, is continuing, and this is part of our strategy as well. Helping our customers understand where is the next place they can use plastics," Chmielewski said. "Years ago, very simple designs, simple molds. Now, we're creating things that might take four or five previous single components and we put it all in one piece. … Certainly, there's not a whole lot of physical barriers to looking at the world in plastics."

And for Peyton, there's something new every day.

"I really enjoy seeing the new products that are presented to us to quote, new materials, and the development as our industry as a whole – whether it's machinery, materials, robotics," Peyton said, "that just excites the heck out of me."