Bottom Line ROI for Plastics Manufacturers

Today’s plastic parts are more complex and processing equipment is more advanced — while highly skilled and experienced employees are becoming harder and harder to find. This is costing plastics processors a lot of money at an increasingly faster rate. Because of this, most plastics manufacturers lose thousands of dollars a month in scrap, downtime, and equipment damage.

Here are five specific areas where in-house skills-development training will directly increase your company’s bottom line.

Reduced Mold Damage

This damage can occur before, during, or after it is run as well as during storage. This is typically reported as a mold repair cost, but much of this cost can be avoided when proper handling, storage, and maintenance skills are implemented.

Fewer Accidents

Your employees are coming to work each day to do the best job that they can. Most accidents occur when employees do not properly understand the equipment, machinery, environment, or process. Many times, they take short cuts because they do not fully understand the consequences of their actions. For example, there have been many burns that occur when an operator or technician pulls a stuck runner from the sprue and some hot pressurized plastic is released at the same time. To avoid this the employee needs to be properly trained to back the carriage up, thereby not allowing pressure to build before reaching into the mold area, because there is pressurized plastic behind sprue when this is not done.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

Everyone wants happy customers. The best approach to customer satisfaction is through Quality Assurance. In plastic processing Quality Assurance relies on a company being able to verify they are using the same process to manufacture the same product each and every time your customer’s job is run. This provides the highest confidence in shipping quality product to your customer each and every time.

Extended Tool & Machine Life

Things wear and break, but improper procedures, handling, and maintenance will always affect your bottom line. For example, when the mold is properly handled during setup, production, and storage, the likely hood of damage is significantly reduced. It’s when an improperly trained employee pries a part from the mold with a screwdriver that you encounter completely avoidable damage which is very costly.

Lower Employee Turnover

When you train one employee, they are likely to leave because they do not have the co-worker support, they need to improve. If you properly train your workforce, then they all have the knowledge and skills to support new processing methods and make improvements that affect the bottom line. Training your entire production workforce results in much more confident and capable employees who will prefer to work together with their fellow employees rather than take their chances somewhere else.

It’s important that you leverage the skills of your entire production workforce and take advantage of the equipment that your company has already invested in. A skilled, competent workforce is the key to success.

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Routsis Training offers a wide range of products and services that can help increase the profitability of your plastics processing operation. Please visit our website to learn more.