Progressive Plastics: Packaging Up Success 

For 38 years, Progressive Plastics Inc. has provided the plastics industry with custom blow molded products.  Rome P. Busa, Sr. founded the company in 1966 in Cleveland, where the company is located today.  His sons, Rome, Jr. (also known as Duke) and Anthony, bought the business from him in the mid 1980s and run it as COO/CFO and President/CEO respectively.

Dave Bornstein, who is Progressive’s Product Engineering Manager, has been with the company for about ten years.  He explains that the company started out specializing in custom blow molding with expertise mainly in extrusion blow molding of PVC.  One of first products they molded, in fact, was the float that helps regulate water levels in toilet tanks.  Later, Progressive made its foray into cosmetic product packaging, molding a variety of products for such customers as Bonne Bell in Cleveland and others like Avon in New York. 

“Progressive Plastics got into the blow molding industry back when glass bottles were much more the norm,” Bornstein says.  “As acceptance of plastic bottles became more commonplace, we got into other blow molding processes, including injection blow molding and injection stretch blow molding, the latter of which is used when molding PET resin into such recognizable products as 2-liter soda bottles.”

Next, Progressive expanded into the housewares packaging market – Rubbermaid is a major customer – the food & beverage market, the household chemicals market and the automotive aftermarket, Bornstein says.  In addition to these new markets, Progressive also continued to expand its footprint in cosmetics packaging for customers Wella, L’Oreal and Avon, among others.  Progressive even molds Bingo markers.

As if that wasn’t enough, Bornstein says another avenue was pursued: the dairy industry.  Progressive is Dairy Certified within the State of Ohio, meaning the company meets the minimum state requirements for sanitation, its employees wear proper hair protection and bottles and other containers are kept covered during the manufacturing process. 

“It comes down to good housekeeping and material handling,” Bornstein comments.  When asked about the wide range of industries Progressive serves, he says, “We’re always looking at lots of different avenues because you never know what products are going to take off and what you may lose [due to competition or just the phasing out of packaging trends].  We’re finding that the food and beverage industry is really growing right now.  It’s a huge growth business for us. 

“There are still lots of companies converting from glass to plastic packaging and they are creating new designs, too,” he continues.  “Hot-filled beverages is another big market, as is carbonated soft drinks and other subsets of this industry.” 

Speaking of competition, Bornstein is asked what makes Progressive stay ahead of growing competition from other countries, such as China. 

“Blow molding is a very regional process because it is very expensive to ship the products blow molders manufacture,” he answers.  “You’re just shipping air.  We serve customers within about a 500-mile radius.  The injection molding industry has been hurt because everyone is going to China for not just the molds but for injection-molded parts and really for the whole product.   With blow molding, to ship empty bottles or packaging from China would probably cost more than it does to make the packaging items themselves, so blow molders aren’t suffering too badly from trade with China, so far.” 

Bornstein admits Progressive has lost business to China, but not much.  He explains that customers, such as Rubbermaid, like being able to place orders for products that can be produced and shipped in a day or two.  Logically, that level of service would be impossible to expect from China. 

For all the blow molding processes Progressive Plastics works with, the company has found that departmentalizing them is the most efficient way to turn out product while maintaining cost-effectiveness and quality.  This funnels down to the vendors who build the tooling, too. 

“With each process we do, we use a different tooling vendor for our molds,” Bornstein says.  “This is kind of unique in our industry.  We try to partner with a preferred supplier for each type of molding process because each tool is unique to the process.  We are looking for them to provide us with a complete turnkey solution.  They are going to design the molds, develop the processes and sample the tooling before we take delivery and put them into full production.”

In addition, unlike with injection mold tooling, blow mold tooling is not really a standardized industry as yet, he says.  The market is not as big, so few have attempted to bring standardization to the forefront.  Bornstein says Progressive is dedicated to incorporating standardized components and processes whenever possible to help create value added and cut costs. 

Keeping up With Technology is Key 

Bornstein says Progressive Plastics was once divided between two neighboring facilities, but in order to better manage the now streamlined processes the two were consolidated into the current 300,000-square-foot building.  There are about 280 employees on board today. 

Progressive’s philosophy is to stay ahead of the technological curve because the packaging industry has proven to be so dynamic, always changing. 

“You always want to be proactive in this industry, not reactive,” Bornstein says. 

A few years ago the company invested in two-stage injection stretch blow-molding technology – a multi-million dollar investment.  With this process, an infrared oven reheats the plastic preforms that are then blown and stretched into their final bottle shapes. Progressive manufactures the injection-molded preforms also. 

“We’re able to leverage our preforms so that we’re able to make multiple containers or bottles from the same preform design, saving tooling dollars and creating one more competitive advantage for our customers,” Bornstein adds. 

“Huge capital investments have been made into that technology and the company will continue to invest in it for the foreseeable future,” Bornstein says.  “A lot of the products we’re making today used to be made using PVC extrusion blow molding processes.  Progressive switched a lot of these customers over to PET because of the obvious advantages.  One is PET doesn’t have environmental concerns that PVC has due to the chlorine found in the PVC.  There’s already a huge recycling stream for PET so it’s totally acceptable.  Another advantage is it is clear like glass.  They call it O (for orientation) PET because it gives you barrier properties to keep moisture in, keep oxygen from getting in, and it’s very strong.  It’s a very efficient package material and leaves very little scrap compared to PVC.  It is also a much more automated process and therefore requires less labor to run.” 

Bornstein says that 10 years ago, PET blow molding represented 0% of Progressive’s sales, but that has quickly grown to a fairly significant percentage – perhaps 20% -- of its business, and it’s growing.  The company expects continued growth in this market for some time to come. 

“Our biggest challenges are to drive out labor and other costs,” he explains.  “We want to make our people more productive and increase parts per unit time.  Whenever we can buy materials less expensively, we’re doing it, and we’re doing everything we can to reduce waste.  All the managers are very focused on their budgets.” 

Progressive employs two in-house tool and die makers.  As Bornstein says, “they are the guys that can fix anything.”  On those rare occasions when something can’t be fixed, then it is outsourced, but he says the company keeps the two guys very busy, not just fixing but maintaining tools to help minimize downtime. 

Progressive puts a lot of emphasis on quality assurance through every run, Bornstein says.  It’s used as an effective indicator that maintenance is needed.  A lot has also been done with Progressive’s mold designs in order to help prevent any unnecessary wear and damage to the tooling.   

Progressive considers its design services to be a key, value-added service.  Using Pro-E, a 3-D solid modeling software that the company has employed for 10 years, product engineers on staff are responsible for product design and development, offering customers an “art to part” process that gives customers manufacturable designs at the right price point every time.  

“Because of the accuracy of the CAD, there is an unbroken chain of tool data, if you will, that shows the customer what the real product will look like,” Bornstein says.  “It saves time and money and allows everyone involved to look at the same product, minimizing interpreted errors.  We will also make a rapid prototype model from the same product design data, if necessary, so the customer can hold it and see it first-hand.” 

Progressive’s product engineers also procure all tooling.  They source and place the jobs, participate in sampling and hand the resulting tools off to production when they are approved. 

In keeping with most successful businesses today, Progressive strives to provide value added services whenever possible.  For example, it has offered bottle decoration services – silk screen-printing, pressure sensitive label application, pad printing, and its newest process heat shrink sleeve labeling – to compliment its in house full bottle engineering and design services for several years.  Heat shrink sleeve labeling is a process in which the bottle is wrapped in full-body color graphics, and is available for bottles that are two ounces in size or larger.  Customers are responding positively to that service, he says. 

Bornstein puts a name to the company’s service philosophy: Customer-centric.   

“We work at developing better relationships with our customers by getting in on projects earlier than traditionally done so there is a better chance of getting the job,” he explains.  “We offer them tech support and advise them on how to produce a better product while at the same time saving money. 

“A big trend in our industry is that our customers’ companies keep getting merged and bought out,” Bornstein continues.  “This happens quite a bit within the cosmetics industry. The problem is that sometimes the larger conglomerates don’t think a smaller operation like ours can handle the work.  That’s why we want to get customers in here early; we want to show them our capabilities so they can see we can handle most jobs – better than many larger companies, in fact.” 

Through its Customer Value Improvement Program, Progressive continually evaluates every aspect of the supply chain adding further value to the goods and services each customer receives. 

More automation is in store for the company, Bornstein says.  In fact, Progressive has developed its own packaging machinery.  Bornstein says it’s in the early implementation stages at this point. 

“It’s been a challenge because we’re not really in that business,” he says, “but it has been interesting because if we can successfully implement a packaging program and show our customers what we can do, it is going to present some major savings for us.  Most of what we’ve done so far has been cartons for shipping more bottles per carton in order to save on shipping costs.  Our machinery allows us to do this uniformly and it’s repeatable with little human intervention.” 

In addition to the wide range of custom blow molding services, Progressive also sells stock bottles.  The bottles range in size from 1/2 ounce to 64 ounces and are available in a wide range of materials including; PET, PETG, PVC, HDPE, LDPE, Post-consumer recycled HDPE, Polypropylene, Barex, Polycarbonate, and Polyurethane. 

For more information about Progressive Plastics, visit the company’s web site at www.progressive-plastics.com, or call 800-252-0053.