Hyderabad, India-based Vasantha Group invested $7 million to open a mold building support facility in West Chester, Ohio, giving it a foothold in the United States as it looks to grow in the medical and packaging markets in North America.
Called VasanthaTech USA, the engineering firm created 20 new jobs related to prototyping, insert molding, high-cavitation molds, micromolding and liquid silicone rubber molding.
The staff works out of a rented facility with 16,000 square feet of manufacturing space and more than 15 machines — including brands like Arburg, Sodick and Makino — for designing parts, proving concepts and producing trial runs.
The Ohio team works closely with VasanthaTech colleagues in India and Austria, eliminating the need for customers to travel to overseas sites, according to VasanthaTech Sales Manager Andrew Cummings.
VasanthaTech customers can find full support in Ohio for production equipment that needs adjustments or spare parts as well as production projects that need design and tooling strategies or factory acceptance tests, Cummings said in a phone interview.
"We are manufacturing one-, two- and four-cavity molds in Ohio, for example, to prove a concept and plan for scalability," Cummings said. "Then, if the customer needs integrated automation, we might build that in Austria, and if they need a 32-cavity mold — and its more budgetary conscious — we build that in India. Then we can ship the automation and the mold from Austria and India to Cincinnati, where we'd integrate it and assemble it."
VasanthaTech handles all the logistics of working with the Austria and India locations to manage the project and have the finished mold shipped to the U.S.
Cummings said the goal is to support the customers Vasantha has and attract new customers who want to do as much business in the U.S. as possible to eliminate overseas travel expenses, time zone differences and language barriers.
Some of Vasantha's large medical customers have sent a team of five people to work a week with their experts in India and Austria on new tooling.