The TPR interviewed Alan Gross, Director of Operations at Webster Plastics in Fairport, NY, near Rochester.  A business unit of Parker Hannifin, Webster Plastics is an award-winning custom plastic injection molder known for its innovation and for excellence in manufacturing. 

What is your company niche, and what does your company do that is notable, unique or different? (ie, technology, innovations)

What’s notable about Webster Plastics is we’ve won several awards for innovation and manufacturing excellence.  With regard to the innovation part of the awards – we’ve won seven major industrial awards in the past six years; three from SPE in recognition of what we call metals to plastic conversion.  One of those projects was for the first ever polymer in an automatic transmission, and the second was for a self-adjusting clutch ring, which enabled the first 100,000-mile warranty in a manual automotive transmission in the late 1990’s.  The third award was for a product that we’ve done successfully for 30 years with no known field failures – basically changing a traditionally die cast aluminum part over to a plastic wiper pivot housing.  That award was a Hall of Fame Award recognizing 30 years of success.

Innovation at Webster continues with other parts that we do the same kinds of things with.  The innovation tends to be automotive but we’re only 50% automotive oriented.  I think it’s because it’s a more ground-breaking industry due to automotive OEMs being more demanding (weight reduction, cost reduction, etc.).  We’ve found you can easily combine parts into one single part and serve the same function at a fraction of the cost.  Automotive seems to be more open-minded to doing these types of conversions. 

The other thing is that a lot of this innovation is enabled by new resin development that results in plastic polymers that are stronger, lighter and more temperature resistant.  All of that comes into play in our partnerships with our suppliers and OEMs and that helps fuel the innovation.

We believe in innovation in application and design but we also couple that with a pretty lean and agile manufacturing and delivery system, and that all adds up to our success as a company.

When and how did you get into the industry, what attracted you to it?

Webster Plastics has been in business since 1946.  So it’s kind of grown from a garage shop, small & privately owned to what it is now.

Personally speaking, I started out working at Eastman Kodak in Rochester, NY.  Through downsizing and restructuring there was less and less opportunity to grow career-wise and to work on ground-breaking projects so I looked for alternatives where you could take elements that were all in place for success and make something bigger from them.  That’s why I came here seven years ago.  I was hired to take all the capabilities that
we already won some awards for and leverage them to help grow the company itself.

Relate a notable "best time" for your company.

There have been many times in the past that have been great, but recently we were awarded a major project that immediately took a targeted prospective customer that we had no dealings with and made it one of our major customers.  That customer is Bosch.  We were able to help them establish a program for their first plastic cylinder head cover here in North America.  Again, this is usually a die cast metal part, but recognizing our niche with a new customer it was a huge undertaking for us – a multi-million dollar project – in which we used not only our manufacturing and engineering prowess but also tested our assembly capabilities.  It turned out to be a good marriage between the two of us.  It tested us in a number of different ways.  We were supplying this product to a very demanding customer, Bosch, and also to DaimlerChrysler which has a rigorous set of quality and systems expectations.  DaimlerChrysler is not quick to action without having a good feeling about the partnership.  Quality is a cornerstone – if you don’t have quality you can’t do much of anything else.  This happened in the last year.  In fact, we’re just ramping that project up right now.  It’s been a four-step manufacturing process – five including molding.  Successfully accomplishing this makes today one of the best times for Webster. 

Similarly, relate notable challenges that your company has overcome.

Becoming established and thriving in the automotive industry is one significant challenge.  Toyota, Bosch, Ford and, most recently, DaimlerChrysler – although they tend to be among the most notable companies, those are also some of the most discriminating when it comes to adding a new supplier. 

Being located in New York makes becoming a growing plastic product supplier quite an accomplishment due to the inherent cost of doing business in this part of the country.  You have to continually prove that you are worth doing business with over globally based suppliers. 

The transmission project that won us one of the innovation awards I mentioned earlier saved GM about $1.3 million per copy.  That’s one area where we caught the attention of Toyota, the other being where we achieved award-winning enterprise wide lean manufacturing systems.  We were once 90% automotive, but ended up firing customers to try to even out our customer base and survive long term.  That was a difficult time, in the mid 1990s, when we did that.  We went to a low of 40% automotive but now are back up to 50% and will hit 65% next year.
 

When you are working on projects with your customers, what aspects would you like them to better recognize?

Two things come to mind…  One is the built in quality from the beginning.  That’s something that customers don’t always recognize.  The value of upfront engineering can’t be emphasized enough, especially with new projects.  Of course you are going to have some hiccups, but they can be minimized by utilizing our engineering expertise in the earliest stage of the project.  The second thing is the value of continuous engineering – once you have that project in place we can continue to see and develop improvements along the way in partnership with the customer.  There is value analysis and engineering that we can offer on long-term partnerships as we learn what the customer needs and expects.  Bosch is an example of a company that started with smaller projects to help gain their confidence in our abilities and then moved to larger projects that fully involved Webster Plastics’ engineering expertise early in the design and development.   

List newly acquired technology, machinery or key personnel (in last year).

We’ve tried to stay on top of the injection molding technology curve. The most visible examples of that are two-shot and microcellular molding. Microcelluar molding creates five to 50 micron-sized holes or a tightly controlled honeycomb like structure embedded in the plastic that basically fills out the cavity of the mold from within. It’s licensed from Trexel– Mucell Technology. 

The biggest development is that we’re a part of [Cleveland-based] Parker Hannifin now. This happened in November 2004. They bought us and incorporated us with a division called Chomerics, which is their material development arm, a part of The Emerging Technologies Group, the ninth group of Parker Hannifin. This is a brand new group that is designed to bring new technologies into the marketplace.  Parker Hannifin is about an $8.2 billion company.   

Chomerics has developed a polymer that is conductive and EMI shielding so that it enables you to mold the equivalent of metal in a very cost effective way.  What they do – and this is kind of neat – is they nickel plate carbon fiber and actually embed that in plastic resin with their dispersion agent that helps the carbon disperse in the mold.  Its trade name is Premier.  We’re molding it for telecommunications, electronics and automotive applications, but it can also be used in many others.  What they wanted us for is to help design the molds and oversee the manufacturing process to be successful.  Premier materials react in different ways that we’re still trying to understand.  It’s been in the industry now for a few years but is only now beginning to take off.  It’s in world-wide demand, most heavily in Asia where telecom companies are big (Motorola, Nortel, etc.).  So we’re helping to successfully introduce this new technology.   

Has your company recently expanded?  Plans to expand or form partnerships/alliances? 

This partnership that’s now an internal partnership is to take the Chomerics Premier product worldwide.  We’re targeting eastern European markets such as Poland, Czech Republic, as well as parts of Asia and replicating this technology there.  And it’s not just Premier product; we’re moving to take our niche (the Webster system as a whole) worldwide. 

Parker Hannifin is present in all of these countries and more.  It’s a partnership that can be developed.  Our customers are demanding that we become successful with procuring Asian tooling and Parker Hannifin is our thread to that opportunity.  Two shops in Asia already have a relationship with one of our strategic customers – one shop can build very sophisticated tooling and the other is more a sweat shop of sorts that does simpler tooling.  Global customers drive our quest to find reliable Asian tooling sources to help make their product line successful.  

Are you involved in any industry organizations or educational programs related to the trade? 

We just won a major award from The Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) that is worldwide in scope.  Before we even won the award they became aware of us and wrote a couple of articles for their magazine, Target.  They have also asked us to help sponsor a three-day event in which 30 people from around the world will be here to learn about what we do, see firsthand how we do it and find out about our lean manufacturing process, our lean transformation.  It’s great exposure for us on a couple of different fronts – it’s a good source of benchmarking and it’s good for our people to look back on our accomplishments and brag about it a little.  We’ve been in this transformation for over 15 years, since our former president [Vern DeWitt] moved from being our customer to being our president.  Without that kind of long-term commitment to success and believing in what you are doing, you’re not going to be successful. 

In addition to the AME, we are also members of the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE), The Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEEE), the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE), the American Production and Inventory Control society (APICS), and the American Society of Quality Control (ASQC).  We’ve sat on boards of directors of a number of these, and won manufacturing awards from the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST), and others.

What do you think about changes occurring in the industry due to globalization?  How has it affected the way you do business? 

It’s taking what’s been a regional business and forcing us global. That would have happened whether we were part of Parker Hannifin or not.  Our biggest customer went bankrupt, actually, and that had a way of changing our view of the business as well.  They moved all of their North American operations to Mexico, so that’s the reality of the business.  It forces you to think globally and also to re-emphasize your niche and puts more importance on having a niche that you can defend.
 

What will the industry look like in 3 to 5 years?

The Rochester area is said to be the second biggest tool-making region per capita in the U.S. – second to Chicago.  I think an interesting fact that I’ve talked about before, especially in the tooling industry, is that now the bigger local companies and some in our customer base have gotten smaller, forcing companies like ours to become lean (meaning both smaller and lean in operations) and it will force us to become more reliant on partnerships, acquisitions and mergers in order to take companies like ours global and give us more reach that our customers are demanding.  Customers are demanding a global reach not only for cost reasons but also because they recognize partnerships being valuable in multiple locations.  You need to be selective in doing that, granted, and it’s not without its risks.  It helps to have a multinational company with us that’s already doing it.

Additional Background Information: 

Number of years in business:  Webster Plastics was established in 1946 in Webster, NY.

Current number of employees:  150 employees 

Current square footage (each location):  75,000 Square feet 

Additional locations:  None at this time, although we do have sales offices in Michigan for serving the automotive industry and we also have sales offices in South Carolina and New Jersey. 

Website:  www.websterplastics.com  

Types of tools built and/or run:  Injection mold tooling including two-shot molding, insert molding and micro cellular molding (Mucell); and all the secondaries that run off of that, such as robotic end-of-arm tooling, sonic welding, sub-assembly, etc.

Industries served: 

• Automotive and Transportation

• Business Machines and Computers

• Electrical

• Electronics

• Appliances

• Consumer Products

• Telecommunications

• General Industrial and Safety

• Medical

• Construction 

Contact Information:  

Webster Plastics, Inc.
83 Estates Drive West
Fairport NY 14450
Telephone: 585-425-7000
FAX: 585-425-7238
Alan Gross, Director of Operations
adgross@parker.com