In 1991 Roche invested heavily in his company’s product development services, opening Erie Plastics’ Innovation Center, a 10,000-square-foot facility housing industrial designers, process engineers, design engineers, tooling engineers, lab technicians, computer specialists and project managers.  This team provides engineering and the product development services as well as a fully equipped metrology lab and three dedicated molding machines.  Erie Plastics even has what it has labeled its Design-A-Bago program, a team of designers and engineers that make house calls anywhere in the world to help customers troubleshoot and develop new product tooling. 

“Over the last four years we lost $30 million in business to some form of competition or obsolescence,” Hoop says frankly.  “It happened to a lot of companies.  But because of our innovation center, we regained those lost sales.  Back when we first opened it most people didn’t think we could make any money on it.  But it was a kind of defensive strategy and a marketing strategy and it worked.” 

Today there is a staff of 15 working in the Innovation Center, but there have been as many as 22 depending on the workload.  The Innovation Center is within the main Erie Plastics facility, but it is its own separate set of offices.  Roche wanted them to be physically separate from the manufacturing side so that his design team could focus on product development exclusively.  

Hoop is a big advocate of hiring interns from Penn State Erie, a local branch of Pennsylvania State University that has a well-known plastics technology program.  In fact, he was very instrumental in getting the plastics program started at the school. 

“Utilizing interns gives us a lot of flexibility and lets us ‘test drive’ individuals to see if they might work out as a full-time hire,” he says. 

While Hoop supports getting more young people interested in working in the tooling and processing industry, he also knows globalization is creating less need for large numbers of suppliers of these services. 

“I think one thing we have to accept is that manufacturing is down-sizing,” he says.  “We can’t let that put companies out of business, however.  You have to respond to the trend rather than resist it.” 

Roche responded to the trend when he opened his 80,000-square-foot Westborough, MA, plant in 1996 and entered into a joint venture 2001 with Loranger Injection Molding, a company that once was based in the U.S. but now owns a 45,000-square-foot processing plant in Szekesfehervar, Hungary, near Budapest.   

Says Hoop; “One of the things we’ve done is follow our customers.  The neat thing is that people say it doesn’t really help our North American operation, but Europeans don’t want to buy products made in America, they want them made there.  We never ship parts back to sell in the U.S.” 

Hoop says he expects the Hungary operation to achieve sales of around $7 million U.S. this year.  He says his Massachusetts plant will see $10-12 million sales total.  Erie Plastics headquarters in Corry, which is about 465,000 square feet in size, will gross around $68 million.

New Plant, New Goals 

In August 2001, Erie Plastics unveiled its newly renovated, state-of-the-art headquarters facility, replete with 64 molding presses in 430,000-square-feet of the building and its corporate offices and Innovation Center taking up the additional 35,000 square feet of space. 

The process of hands-off and lights out manufacturing and ultra lean operations are being implemented as one of several goals set for the company.  Roche says his second goal is to continue to grow his company, but positioning Erie Plastics so that the company can be selective and work with customers that will afford it some protection and loyalty. 

The third goal is further investment in “barrier to entry” break-through products – products that are patented or protected.  Hoop says that six products currently account for more than 1/3 of his sales.  He would like to increase that ratio. 

Overwhelming positive customer experience is the fourth goal. 

“This means going beyond having a good relationship with the customer,” says Roche.  “We want it to be so good that Erie is the only vendor they want to use. 

“We’re different,” he continues.  “We make 30 million parts a day.  We’re so large and so automated that we have our own lean program.  It was necessary because our main quality concern is how to handle massive amounts of parts.” 

Cutting edge technology means more than just airveying systems for materials and product handling at Erie Plastics.  It also means running 4-level stack molds.  128 cavities are the norm and the company succeeds in coaxing parts out of them at very fast cycles.  It’s not uncommon to achieve cycle times of between 6-10 seconds, allowing many of the presses to produce a million parts a day, each. 

Hoop’s team goes beyond the usual sales relationships, too. 

“We’ve always been really good at relationships,” he explains.  “We pay a lot of attention to the fill plants.  Whoever we are selling to, the people who are making the products are just as important as those who are in purchasing.” 

Repeating his mantra on specializing, Hoop says, “We’re more focused now and have narrowed down our niche.  We can’t do everything for everybody.  Caps, closures and lids are our dominant thing.” 

Erie Plastics manufactures them for everything from soap dispensers and pharmaceutical products to coffee cans, household cleaner containers and deodorant.  The list is almost too long to print. 

Roche strives to strike a balance in his plants so that his employees want to learn and improve on operational efficiencies. 

“We focused on the culture,” says Roche.  “I’m a big supporter of empowerment and against bureaucracy.” 

Health, safety and morale programs are firmly in place at Erie Plastics and Hoop says his employees appreciate the family atmosphere and are very loyal to it.  At the same time, there is a consistently aggressive focus on operations and making changes and working diligently on factory efficiency.  There are about 425 employees between the three plants. 

Erie Plastics hosts an open house every 5 years.  In 2001, at last open house, about 4,000 people visited and toured the Corry plant.  Tom Ridge, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, was a high school classmate of Hoop’s and was going to cut the ribbon.  However, the 9/11 attacks happened and Ridge was needed at our nation’s capital.  Nevertheless, it was a full house that day. 

“I always tell people that if they come to visit our plant, it will be different that almost any other injection molding plant they’ve seen,” says Hoop.  Whatever it is, it’s clear there’s something about Erie Plastics that makes an impression.