Anaheim, Calif. — Contract manufacturing is the name of the game for customers — typically OEs in the medical space — that are looking to design and produce medical components.
In fact, design for manufacturing, or DFM, often is the only game in town, according to Eric Yando, director of sales for Tessy Plastics Corp., a custom contract manufacturer based in Skaneateles, N.Y.
"We play in all spaces and look at every opportunity on an individual basis," Yando told Rubber News, a sister publication of Plastics News, Feb. 6 at the IME West Show, which drew more than 14,000 people over three days to the Anaheim Convention Center. "With these individual cases, Tessy has evolved over the past five or six years from a standard injection molder to a company that focuses on downstream, value-added processes."
Customer credibility is developed through proper part functionality, and Tessy embraces the complex, Yando said.
"If there is a piece of automation attached to the process or complex molding, any value-added process ... we play in the high-tech, complex spaces for medical components," Yando said.
Founded in 1973, Tessy celebrated its golden anniversary last year.
The company works in the medical, pharmaceutical, diagnostics and consumer health care markets, in that order of market percentage and typically in liquid silicone rubber, thermoplastic elastomers and thermoplastic urethanes.
"With the two-shot applications is where we work in rubber, overmolding a base component with a TPE or TPU seal," Yando said. "LSR has seen really good growth over the past five years, and for us this all started in the research and development lab."
LSR can be "a little different than standard injection molding," Yando said.
"We saw that with our customer base, that there was a gap in our services and this was an opportunity," he said. "So Tessy purchased an LSR machine before even offering services to the market. We learned the processes and built our own prototype molds.
"Now we are a large-scale, high-cavitation molder for a lot of our customers in this space."
With research and design manufacturing facilities — measuring about 3.2 million square feet in total — in New York, Pennsylvania and Shanghai, China, the company has net sales of about $500 million annually.
The company made two key acquisitions in 2019 (now Tessy Automation and Tessy Tooling), complementary business units that vertically integrate the Skaneateles (pronounced "skinny atlas") firm.
Tessy Automation and Tessy Tooling are both based in Pennsylvania — Meadville and Erie, respectively.
Ultimately, outsourced or in-house partnerships are a function of the part's requirements.
"We don't use these companies for everything, but we do use them for the right applications," Yando said. "We work in a lot of spaces and different applications."
For instance, Tessy Tooling — a fourth arm for development and production is Tessy Shanghai — may not be best suited to making a consumer health care mold.
"With some LSR molds, perhaps we need to leverage our own company or others, as needed," Yando said. "But the support of those systems in-house is a net benefit for us. From a capabilities perspective, bringing these companies under the Tessy umbrella has really helped."