Diversified Products wins PN Excellence Award for customer relations

Rapid manufacturing is an important part of the business plan at Diversified Plastics Inc., a custom injection molder based in Brooklyn Park, Minn.

That specialty paid off in 2020, as DPI was able to quickly take on new projects during the COVID-19 pandemic. And that helped DPI qualify as a repeat finalist for the Plastics News Processor of the Year award and win of our PN Excellence Award for customer relations.

DPI joined the Carbon Production Network in 2018, using 3D printers to quickly bring new products to market as well as making impossible-to-mold items. The company branded the area the Acceleration Station.

In March 2020, as the pandemic started to impact business, CEO Kevin Hogan said DPI decided to prioritize employee safety and business continuity. That meant keeping workers on the payroll, keeping them safe and using whatever spare capacity was available to help in the battle against COVID.

Right from the beginning, that created an opportunity to use its capabilities to make some much-needed face shields.

"We jumped into things quickly with an attitude where we could literally be making products within hours," Hogan said. DPI connected with a company that wanted to produce 2 million face shields. DPI used its Carbon Digital Light Synthesis printers to make the halos that wrapped around users' heads and is attached to the clear shield.

When even additive manufacturing couldn't make product fast enough, it decided to build a tool for making injection molded parts. Typically building a tool would take weeks. But with hospitals and first responders reporting dangerous shortages of personal protective equipment, that wasn't fast enough.

"We started to work on a tool on a Thursday. And I challenged him to do it in a week. And everybody said that was crazy. And these guys took it upon themselves and said: 'Dammit, we're gonna show that Hogan.' And you know, by Saturday it was done and we were producing product on Monday," Hogan said.

DPI also produced ventilator parts and splitters, which are components that allow one ventilator to support two patients.

Another important project was molding components for pulse oximeters, an electronic device that measures pulse rate and saturation level of oxygen in red blood cells. DPI actually won that project in late 2019, before it was known that the pandemic would drive unprecedented demand for the devices.

Doctors started to use pulse oximeters to identify COVID patients who needed early treatment, potentially keeping them off ventilators.

"We expected them to be a nice midsized customer," Hogan said, but, "their business absolutely went up like a rocket."

The Plastics News Processor of the Year award measures companies based on seven criteria: financial performance, quality, customer relations, employee relations, environmental performance, industry/public service and technological innovation.

DPI scored well in all of the criteria, but when it came to customer relations, it was off the charts.

DPI customers including Nonin Medical Inc., maker of the pulse oximeters, praised the molder.

"The team at DPI was able to quickly assess the surge in volume and develop a plan, including additional tooling, to increase capacity," Kristin Finberg, project manager at Nonin, said. "DPI has done an amazing job meeting our needs for increased production, and DPI was in the right place at the right time."

Michael Brenzel, a co-founder of medical device maker NPX Medical LLC in Plymouth, Minn., described his firm's relationship with DPI as a partnership.

"We've worked with most of the plastic suppliers in town the past 25 years," Brenzel said. "We have worked with other vendors that have the same machines that have been unable to do what Diversified does with its machines."

DPI started supplying NPX at the end of 2019.

"Diversified was able to produce parts at a higher tolerance, meet our dimensional requirements, extremely fast and less expensive," Brenzel said. He credited the company's experience in both injection molding and 3D printing.

"I think their long history of understanding how plastics behave, from their molding business, has allowed them to take their new tools and do things with it that a lot of others can't."

A.J. Frisell, a technical support engineer at DPI, said the company is pushing to improve the additive manufacturing process.

"We feel we are the experts on these machines, where we're pushing this technology … to really hone in on 100 percent repeatability with these machines, which can be a downfall of additive manufacturing," Frisell said. "When you take the parts that we're creating — the unique geometries, some of the unique post-processing styles that we're developing here — we're really pushing the technology to hone in on what it does really well, which is create injection molding-like surfaces on complicated geometries."

Solving problems for customers is something that dates back to the early years at DPI, according to founder James Dow and Annette Lund, two of the company's original 13 employees. Dow started DPI in 1977.

"With 10,000 molders in the country, the only thing we could offer that would set us apart from everyone else was customer service," Dow said.

Today DPI has more than 100 employees at two plants — it purchased Pacific Plastics Injection Molding in Vista, Calif., in 2018. As of 2020, workers at both plants are part of the employee stock ownership plan.

In the past few years, DPI has been strengthening its engineering department. That's aimed at providing customers with project management and design for both injection molding and additive manufacturing.

"We are in a very highly technical field, manufacturing medical devices, technical products and programs," Engineering Manager Vincent Pope said. "And where both our customers and Diversified Plastics benefit the most is the relationships we have with our customers at the development phase, right at the beginning, before they're putting a pencil on a paper.

"We can help them design for manufacturability, design for additive manufacturability, make designs to get their product to market faster, at less cost," Pope said.

Another part of the corporate culture is dealing ethnically and honestly. Chief Financial Officer Roger Vang cited that as a reason that DPI did not pursue Paycheck Protection Program funds during the pandemic year.

"That goes back to our core values," Vang said, because the company determined that it would be OK without PPP money.

"There were other smaller companies that needed that money more than we did," Vang said.

This marks the second year in a row that DPI has been honored as a Processor of the Year finalist. Last year the company won the PN Excellence Award for Employee Relations.