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The TPR talked to Peter Wigmore, Business Development Manager at Sovrin Plastics, an award-winning plastic injection molding company located in Slough, Berkshire in the U.K. Sovrin specializes in injection molding, micromolding and also offers tool design and building services. What is your company niche, and what does your company do that is notable, unique or different?
ago where an American company was developing a medical device for wound closure molded in a polymer that was bio-absorbable and needed it to be micromolded. We helped them develop the part and provided the tooling. The product was tested and eventually we built them some production tooling. They even bought a machine identical to ours to run in their own facility producing parts from duplicate tooling made for them by Sovrin. When and how did you get into the industry, what attracted you to it?
Manager. Part of the job of my team is sitting down and working out the pricing and you have to have good industry experience in order to do that job correctly. Wherever possible we show customers better ways to mold a product and suggest materials to use or advise them to avoid using some materials, depending on the product.
Relate a notable "best time" for your company. This is very difficult to answer because there has been a sort of organic growth in the company reacting to the demands of its customer base. Whilst there are some notable markers it’s difficult to separate out any one time. The biggest change for the company was probably when the first Class 10,000 cleanroom was built in 1982.
Similarly, relate notable challenges that your company has overcome. We don’t just take a drawing of something and say, okay, we have got a way to make it. We ask a lot of questions about the project – not to be rude or undermine the customer’s expertise but to really understand their goals and the dynamics of the product.
educate some of our people on Lean Sigma and Operational Excellence. This enables our people to strip a job down into its constituent parts and rewrite the methodology to provide the most efficient and cost-effective production process. We identify the way to adapt and meet opportunities. Qualifications to ISO standards, registration with the FDA and building manufacturing cells to meet specific manufacturing challenges in cleanroom. Where necessary these facilities have been installed with specialized equipment ranging from four-color pad printing to custom-built laser cutting and welding equipment. On the opposite end of the scale from large production cells we also offer a number of campaign rooms for development projects and short-run assembly. The product for which we won the Horners award was designed from the start to be assembled from molded components. In one area the designer had incorporated a length of piano wire to make the instrument function. Somebody on our team asked, “Why don’t you mold that part as well?” The customer didn’t think we could, but we said we thought it was feasible and set about researching the product and how it would be used in order to locate the right molding material. With the collaboration of one of our polymer suppliers, Ticona, we were able to identify a suitable grade of thermoplastic, liquid crystal polymer (LCP) that helped make the product moldable and more efficient to make, as well. The other components in the device are molded in polybutylene terephthalate (PBT) and polyphenylene sulfide (PPS)
When you are
working on projects with your customers, what aspects would you like
them to From our point of view, everything we do here is almost always technically challenging. In order to really understand how a thing works, we really try to encourage the people we’re dealing with to talk to us as early as possible in the design stages, when the design is still just a thought on a small piece of paper. They can then get the best marriage of our skills and experience matched with theirs to produce a cost-effective solution to product design and manufacture.
List newly acquired technology, machinery or key personnel (in last year).
mills. These are Haas brand. The other thing we’ve got is a Sodick CNC Sink EDM AP1L machine, which is quite unique and used for small, intricate work. It’s also the first of its kind in Europe, kept originally only in Japan, but we persuaded them to let us have the first one in Europe.
Has your company recently expanded? Plans to expand or form partnerships/alliances? No plans to change the nature of the company. It’s a family-owned operation and that’s the way it will stay as far as I can see. The founder of the company, Peter Joiner, started it in the 1960’s and clearly continues to get a real buzz from seeing his enterprise and people flourish. His two sons both have an active role in the business.
been involved in an exciting medical product for three years now, and if that takes off the way we expect it will, it will require us to establish a whole new facility in order to handle its production.
Are you involved in any industry organizations or educational programs related to the trade? We’re not involved in any formal organizations within the industry. It’s never really appealed. We continue to work closely with local training agencies to help us find young people who are interested in learning to become toolmakers or molding technicians. We are finding this increasingly difficult because it seems the kids would rather sit in front of a computer. This seems ironic when you think about how much reliance modern tool design and manufacture has on computers through CAD and CAM! We have an apprenticeship program but have not got an apprentice at the moment because it’s been so difficult to find an enthusiastic individual with the right qualities. Maybe I’m being unfair; it could be that today’s youth just don’t see a future for manufacturing in general and toolmaking in particular.
What do you think about changes occurring in the industry due to globalization? How has it affected the way you do business?
What will the industry look like in 3 to 5 years? I think the toolmaking industry here is shrinking rapidly. The number of companies we’ve dealt with in the time I’ve worked at Sovrin and have now gone out of business is frightening. The knowledge and skills we’re losing is devastating – it’s not something you can store on a DVD to use later. Commodity products will continue to be more competitive, and while China and India will eventually get into cleanroom molding, it’s not so easy fortunately. The Far East will catch up with us eventually in costs and somewhere else will become the cheap production region for the world. Additional Background Information: Number of years in business: 41 Current number of employees: 160 employees Current square footage: 30,000 square feet Additional locations: None at this time. Website: www.sovrin.com Link to Horners website: www.horners.org.uk Types of tools built and/or run: Injection molding tools and micro molding tools Industries served: Medical, pharmaceutical, engineering and electronic industries
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