In 1994 Shirley Wang, president of Plastpro, Inc. (Livingston, NJ), started her company with a desk and a phone. Plastpro initially sold fiberglass doors made in Taiwan to the new-construction and remodeling markets in the United States.
As the business grew, Wang started thinking about opening a U.S. manufacturing facility to shorten lead times and thereby enhance the competitiveness of Plastpro's distributors. In 2000, Wang and her management team -- husband Walter Wang, chief executive officer; Johnny Mai, chief financial officer; and Franco An, general manager -- began planning in earnest for a $30 million manufacturing facility capable of producing 1 million doors per year. The 250,000-square-foot plant started up at the end of March 2005, in Ashtabula, OH, made initial shipments in April, and celebrated with grand opening festivities in June.
But, before it could compete with lower-cost, offshore manufacturing facilities, Plastpro needed to cut costs by automating its door manufacturing process. The company deployed robotic assembly and electronic controls that consistently produce a high-quality product, accelerate throughput and reduce lead time by 75 percent versus competitors with manual operations. Installation of an ERP system that will network the factory floor and link it to other company facilities will improve yields and throughput even more by the end of 2006.
Unlike traditional door production, which is largely a manual operation, Plastpro's Ashtabula plant relies heavily on automation in the form of programmable logic controllers from Rockwell Automation's Allen-Bradley (Mayfield Heights, OH) and Mitsubishi Electric Automation, Inc. (Vernon Hills, IL), plus robotic work stations, counters, encoders and programmable fixtures. Report functionality built into the PLCs allows Plastpro to track current events and provides access to a limited historical database. "As we complete each shift, we use this information to document and record the actual performance of the line, including the number of products made, cycle times, material consumption and yields," says Dave Moeller, assistant plant manager.
The automated plant in Ashtabula is two or three times more productive than the traditional manual fiberglass door manufacturing operation. And, besides shortening lead times by up to 75 percent compared to its competitors, the plant allows Plastpro to sell a "Made in the USA" product and gives it the flexibility to produce many different door designs as well as custom products. "We have made and continue to develop some very specialized doors with different construction methods to meet very particular needs," says Moeller. "The plant gives us a lot of flexibility to meet unique customer requirements."
Now in operation for roughly six months, the plant is beginning a phased project to integrate factory floor systems with a new enterprise resource planning system, which is designed for discrete made-to-order manufacturers.
Location, Location, Location
Before launching the Ashtabula plant, Plastpro thought long and hard about where to locate the U.S. facility, says Moeller. The Ashtabula location in the northeast corner of Ohio near the Pennsylvania border gives Plastpro two significant advantages: a strong supplier base and a highly skilled labor pool. Fiberglass manufacturing has a significant presence in the region, so there are many suppliers, specialty service providers and experienced workers. The area also is home to many automotive industry suppliers. "People have been very well trained, not only in production, but in meeting high quality standards," notes Moeller.
From the beginning of the facility planning process, the primary goal was to build a plant that could produce doors that combine quality, structural integrity and durability with a cost-effective price at a volume of 1 million units per year.
To help achieve this goal, "We have chosen to integrate automation into as many phases of the process as it made good economic sense to do," reports Moeller. The flexibility automation brings is essential because the company produces so many different doors. With six different door designs, each available with two texture variations, six widths and three lengths, Plastpro produces 216 basic doors under the Distinction Doors brand name. Add custom lengths, special hinging or latching setups, and the potential variations quickly climb into the thousands.
The Ashtabula facility consists of two door production lines and five fiberglass skin manufacturing lines, with three more fiberglass skin manufacturing lines scheduled to be operational before the end of 2005.
On any given day, a production schedule details size and design parameters of doors that need to be made to meet approved ship dates. Based on the particulars of an order, sizes are run in sequence. As one size is completed, the operator inputs the next size to be produced, so components can be pulled and positioned at input points before the line restarts.
Door production occurs primarily in robotic work stations equipped with a series of encoders and programmable fixturing. During production, a door skin is fed into position and a PLC-controlled, hot-melt glue applicator applies glue along the perimeter and at other locations. The skin is then picked up and moved to the next station, where the frame is set into place and aligned. This assembly is picked up and set in a compression press to seat the frame and squeeze the glue line to a minimum thickness and provide a high-quality bond between the skin and the stiles and rails. Once bonded, the assembly is picked up and placed at another glue application station, and the top skin is set in place. This subassembly is picked up and placed in a compression press. Upon exiting the press, the door-shaped box is ready for filling with polyurethane foam.
At this point, the assembly has been untouched by human hands. "If settings are right, you make nothing but good doors," says Moeller. "It really drives variability out of the process," he adds.
The polyurethane foam injector sets itself up based on door dimensions and inserts the proper amount of insulating foam between the two skins. Once filled, the door moves to the machining stage for finishing and customization.
Planning Is the Key
During the plant planning phase, Plastpro personnel worked with vendors to develop a Gant chart, which laid out milestones like foundation set for equipment mounts, equipment delivery, mechanical completion of setup, wiring and electrical, debugging and adjustments to automation. The transitional phase from construction project to production occurred over a few weeks and provided an opportunity to resolve issues with automation and make test runs. "Operators were involved in almost all phases of the process," recalls Moeller. "They participated in aligning the equipment, supported the PLC debug activity and provided the lion's share of input about changes to make the system more operator friendly," he reports.
Of course, even the most experienced team doesn't foresee every potential problem, especially when it is automating a process for the first time. For Plastpro, one glitch occurred when optical sensors tuned for a smooth, white fiberglass skin could not detect a textured skin due to a subtle difference in surface reflectivity. However, after some fine-tuning to reach a happy medium, sensors were adjusted to detect both textured and smooth surfaces.
At this point in the plant's first year of operation, with some equipment still in the installation phase and additional personnel to be hired and trained, Moeller and the rest of the manufacturing team are working on completing the transition from startup to full production.
The next step is integration of the production line equipment with an ERP system. This new ERP system will network the Ashtabula facility and link it to the corporate headquarters in Livingston as well as to distribution centers in Stockton, CA; Adel, GA; Meadville, PA; and Taiwan, where product can be customized before shipping.
Once live the system will provide scheduling and inventory management from purchase to shipment as well as statistical process control. As a result, personnel will be able to track production in real time and monitor downtime and line efficiency. With that information, personnel can focus on improving efficiency and yield as the company ramps up to annual production of 1 million doors in 2006. Goals include cutting current lead times in half -- from two weeks to one -- and achieving a yield rate in excess of 98.00% by the end of 2006.
"One of the issues with integration," says Moeller, "is that it is hard to turn the scads of data collected into actionable information. Recording information is wonderful, but unless you can analyze it to drive improvements you are wasting money," he explains. Therefore, "as we take each step in the integration process and enlarge the amount of data collected, we are also expanding our analysis capabilities. This information then becomes our guidance to focus resources to improve product quality, yield and uptime."
Plastpro is taking a phased approach to the integration project, which is expected to take six to 12 months and involves building interfaces between factory floor and ERP systems by Plastpro's system team. A number of workers have integration experience from previous jobs. "There's probably 100 years of experience among the half dozen members of our manufacturing management team," says Moeller. "We've carefully thought out what to include and what to avoid based on their experience," he says.
Eventually, the manufacturing management system will be integrated with the order process. "We want to integrate that as a whole rather than piecemeal," Moeller says.
"Shirley and Walter had a clear vision of what they wanted the facility to be," concludes Moeller. "There's a strong commitment to long-term results and a clear business strategy that focuses on high-quality products at a reasonable price." Supporting that strategy is a philosophy of intelligent use of automation, a commitment to make products for the U.S. market in the United States and the belief that proponents of outsourcing often do not see the true costs involved.