COVID prompts new technology for Protolabs

Plymouth, Minn. — As a specialist in rapid manufacturing, Proto Labs Inc. was in a strong position to help its customers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We started seeing orders related to COVID back in February [2020]. We initially started seeing an order surge because factories in China closed down for the Chinese New Year and they didn't reopen right away," Gurvinder Singh, global product director, said in a recent interview at the company's Plymouth plastics manufacturing plant.

"We had customers who came to us because — and this is part of our business model — we always have open capacity to do urgent things. That allowed us to start addressing those supply chain issues that they were starting to see early on," Singh said.

"And then that quickly turned to a surge in COVID-related supplies. We said, to play our part for COVID, we're going to prioritize those customers, we're going to move everything to one day, which is the quickest turn we can do."

Proto Labs, which is known in official messaging as Protolabs, was founded in 1999 as a prototyping specialist. The publicly traded company, which is based in Maple Plain, Minn., has always been a mold maker and injection molder. But in many ways the company is more like a software/tech company than a traditional plastics processor.

Protolabs was one of five finalists for the Plastics News 2021 Processor of the Year award. To recognize its unique capabilities, it also received a brand-new award: the PN Excellence Award for Technological Innovation.

The firm was founded as Protomold Co. Inc. in 1999 and was an early adopter of digital manufacturing technology.

Founder Larry Lukis, an entrepreneur and self-described computer geek, believed that the time needed to manufacture injection molded parts could be radically reduced with the integration of complex software to automate the process.

"Larry was looking for plastic parts to go into printer engines he was involved with building at the time. And just the entire customer experience of getting a quote from an injection molder and then finally getting parts was frustratingly long," said Chris Walls-Manning, the company's director of manufacturing software.

"He basically, in back of his mind, said, 'I know I can do this better and faster,' and he set off creating what originally was Protomold, started in sort of a garage in Long Lake and eventually moved here to Maple Plain, with an emphasis on doing it better and faster with software edge," Walls-Manning said.

Lukis aimed to take out as much of the manual work involved in the quoting process, then "learn as much as he could about mold making and then turn that on its head by going away from traditional mold making techniques," Walls-Manning said.

The goal was to be able to go from a computer-aided design to finished injection molded parts in just a few days. All of the company's molds are aluminum, and there are some limitations on complexity.

"The typical mold maker that you are used to working with is not what we have. We have automated the toolpathing. Our machining is done by trained operators, as opposed to machinists. What you see is a single person responsible for a long string of mills because they can call up the program, just set it up and run," said Mike Kenison, vice president and general manager.

"And then, when we get to the mold making, the polishing, the build, the ejector pins, all that kind of stuff, we have technicians that do that. But we don't have in that kind of typical mold making position, like you might be used to seeing," he said.

Greg Wesling, director of injection molding manufacturing operations, said Protolabs' capabilities are a good fit for customers in a race to commercialize products.

"Turnaround speed is what our customers really love," Wesling said. "They love the fact that they can have an idea, say on Wednesday, send us some uploads and support ideas, and we can have parts in our hands by Friday or by Monday of next week."

When the company first started, it primarily made simple tools and parts with smaller-cavity molds and easy-to-process materials. But that's been changing.

"We're moving more into what we call on-demand manufacturing," Wesling said. "We'll start with your first parts, but we'd love to do your 10,000-part runs, your 100,000-part runs as well. We're seeing our business really changing in that direction.

"In the early days, our capabilities were such that we were taking on pretty much the jobs that were simpler. One dimension, no cams, no side action," Wesling said. "As our customers started to use us more and more, they kept asking for more, and we kept putting more research into things and trying different things. And really, our capabilities have just exploded in 20 years," he said.

"You know, when you walk out to the plant floor, you'll seldom see a simple job. We are doing highly complex molds with multicavities, six to eight cams and side actions. You name it, we're doing just about everything out there, including overmolding, including LSR molding. We're doing all kinds of new stuff," Wesling said.

"Every time we seem to hit a wall, we sit back, think, scratch our heads and then jump over the wall and do the next thing," he said.

The COVID-disrupted supply chains of 2020 and 2021 also prompted rapid change at Protolabs. Singh said one key was learning to inspect parts quickly, without slowing down the manufacturing process.

"With COVID, we started noticing that we were getting parts to customers in three days, and then the customers took three weeks to validate those parts," Singh said.

"We knew we had to solve this problem for a high-mix environment. So we put our R&D team to it, and that's how we released what we call our Critical-to-Quality Inspection in March of 2021," he said.

Protolabs asked customers what dimensions are critical to inspect, and it built inspection of those dimensions into the process with as much automation as possible.

"The other thing that COVID did, it pushed us into more high-volume molding," Singh said. "We did it for the right reasons. Like for one home testing kit, we did over 5 million parts."

With labor in short supply, that's meant using more automation in injection molding, including collaborative robots.

"We always had the idea of deploying cobots. We started developing different cases for them, like removing parts, then removing and placing parts, and then that expanded to removing and trimming parts," Singh said.

Singh said COVID also prompted Protolabs to use scientific molding, including monitoring cavity pressure on some jobs.

"That's a result of the transition from being a prototype supplier to being a production supplier. With prototyping, all we talked about was speed. But when you go to production, it's still about speed, but it's also about consistency and reliability," Singh said.

Now Protolabs can talk with customers about design-for-manufacturing, cavity pressure and other variables.

"We want to spend the time upfront because it helps set the right expectation and set us for long-term success. And then the customer gets consistency and reliability," Singh said.

While business at Protolabs changes every day, including a wide variety of end markets, Singh said there's one thing that its customers have in common.

"If there's high level of innovation, we want to be there, we want to be your partner, because we can help you turn things around a lot faster, iterate through it," Singh said.