Prestige Mold: Cutting Edge Technology, Traditional Values – PART I

Prestige Mold was born out of familiar roots, started in a garage and grown through much hard work and inspired talent, but that’s about where the familiarity ends.  This Rancho Cucamonga, CA, based injection mold manufacturer’s leadership is anything but typical. 

Enter Donna Koebel, CEO of Prestige and proud of it.  In 1983 she started the company in partnership with her husband Mike who was a journeyman moldmaker.  Donna handled the business side of things and never imagined at the time that someday she’d be holding the reins to a widely recognized and respected company in this male-dominated field. 

Says Donna, “I never pictured myself running the company, but I found out that I was a lot stronger than I ever thought I could be.” 

In more ways than one, to be sure.  Mike passed away six years ago from a rare form of cancer.  Donna was left in charge of Prestige and worked through some challenges that being a woman didn’t make any easier.  Though she doesn’t like to make an issue of it, she’s secure in the fact that she was able to hold her own and keep her company as viable as it ever was when Mike was alive. 

“I feel like I’ve had to work harder than the average person,” she explains.  “It was hard the first year; we had several customers that thought of pulling out, not realizing that I had been involved from the beginning.” 

Most of the company’s customers stayed because Donna proved her capabilities as a mold shop owner and showed the company would go on, and it has done so with great success. 

“We had three objectives in mind when we started Prestige,” says Donna.  “One is to build quality products through the company’s attention to detail.  Two, meet all of our commitments on time; and three, create an environment our employees, the greater community and the plastics community would take pride in.” 

She says she still goes back to these very basic and traditional goals and has never wavered in her belief that they form the foundation of success Prestige rests on today. 

In the beginning and through the years until 1995, the company moved from a 1,400-square-foot building with six employees to a 5,000-square-foot facility with 25 employees and then to a 12,000-square-foot building with approximately 42 employees.  All were located in Rancho Cucamonga.  Five years later, in November 1995, the Koebels custom built the 29,000-square-foot building where Prestige is found today.  The company eventually peaked at 75 employees. 

“We were busting out of the seams of the other building,” Donna states simply – and the company had some pretty well established customers at that time, too.  Prestige’s main market focus was the irrigation industry; and a lot of work was also done for the electronics industry.   

“We were always known as the shop that everyone came to if they had a difficult project,” she explains.  Lower cavity molds were the norm in the beginning but then a transition into higher cavity tooling jump started the company into what would begin an evolutionary process that helped solidify the company’s success even in challenging times. 

High Tech Cells Ensure Quality 

Patrick Elliott, who is Prestige’s engineering manager, explains that taking the company through the process of going high tech has really helped streamline operations and save valuable time. 

“From 1998 until the present, we have really worked to adopt many of the theories of manufacturing technology that so many of the larger OEMs had adopted,” he says.  “Prestige’s plant has gone from a departmental type of setup to a high tech automation cell with an operator, a piece of equipment and a robot.  We wanted to implement dedicated cells in order to provide more flexible manufacturing operations for our customers. 

“The way our building is laid out, it made sense to start with departmentalization of operations, Elliott continues.  “Specialization was the plan.  There is no front-to-back setup, but plans do include continued streamlining as we go.” 

Recently the company made a large investment in the programming of a custom software application that links each department within the company to the other as customer service goes.  For example, says Elliott, sales drives engineering’s acquisition of data necessary for implementing the project, which helps drive the manufacturing process. 

“It’s all been evolving,” he says.  “As time goes on, the software application will control more of the manufacturing.  We’re trying to incorporate more quality assurance into the manufacturing process.  For example, our electrode making process is documented all the way down to a flow chart.  Using our CMM, we compare the first article electrode to the 3-D CAD model.  If that matches up correctly to spec, the rest of the electrodes are made.” 

Elliott says the old philosophy was to manufacture all the electrodes together and prove them out at the end of the process.  By implementing the new process, you eliminate reworking a whole batch of electrodes, thus saving valuable time. 

“We can use our automated processes to manufacture and inspect the rest of the electrodes in lights out operations with no one here,” he adds. 

Prestige has been slowly changing more of its departments to follow suit. 

“We have automation for processing steel for manufacturing core and cavity blocks,” Elliott explains.  “It’s a similar process to the one used to make our electrodes.” 

The company is also online with automation in the EDM department.  The first burn is done using live man-hours, the dimensions are proven out and then the rest of production is performed at night or over the weekend using lights-out operations. 

Prestige currently employs 65.  The company has operated at about the same production level with about 10 fewer employees. 

“We had to get everyone on board,” says Koebel.  “The objective was to increase productivity with the same amount of people.  In 2001, due to economic slowdowns, sadly we had to let go of some people.  But lately we have increased productivity by about 20% annually due to the automation.” 

Today, Prestige’s molds are about 70% medical; the rest made up of those for irrigation products, some industrial automation components and consumer products such as closures and high tech.  The company is leaning more and more toward higher cavitation tools. Basic specialties include two-material (two-shot) molds, stack molds, unwinding molds, collapsing cores and multi-sequence molds. 

“We build a lot of molds for a wide variety of medical products,” Koebel says.  “We began to market our skills in that realm five years ago because we wanted to change our philosophy on the kind of customer we were looking for.  We had a reputation for building a high quality tool and wanted to find customers such as medical that appreciate our level of work.” 

The last three years Koebel and her team put a very concerted marketing effort toward that industry and have they seen about a 13% increase in sales annually as a result. 

The company has been investing in new machinery as well.  The last machine purchased was a 160-ton Husky Hylectric molding press that gave Prestige in-house sampling capabilities. It’s part of Koebel’s plan to set up a tech center for troubleshooting, sampling and other final process proofing processes to give customers a complete, one-stop mold program.  Overall, Prestige has invested approximately $4 million over the last four years in automation and machinery.   

We’re moving continuously toward computer-driven manufacturing,” says Elliott.  “3-D models can be called up at any terminal and machine to keep quality in check and speed up the communications and troubleshooting processes.  We trained all of our employees in-house and implemented our own instruction manuals to help them really sink their teeth into technological advancements in plant.” 

Having coordinated some of the training, Elliott reflected on how surprised he was to hear one of the “old school” moldmakers – one who fought against using the new technologies – tell him that he actually really liked it after all.   

“It took about a year to get everybody online,” he says.  “It’s still evolving.  We have meetings and make changes and refinements to the system regularly.” 

“Our guys do understand what’s going on out there and why the changes have to be made,” adds Donna.  “I often try to make the guys aware of what’s going on out in the industry because they should know.  There is a sense of urgency with every project and no one takes anything for granted here.” 

You could say that attitude translates to her avid participation in industry organizations.  Koebel and members of her company are involved on some level in several mold-related societies and they’ve won the admiration of many of their peers. 

In fact, Prestige was recently awarded the American Mold Builders Association’s (AMBA) Mold Builder of the Year award.  According to a press release issued on Prestige’s behalf, the award is given to an AMBA member who excels in business, contributes to the industry and promotes mold making through a variety of activities, and exemplifies the high quality standards and ethics of a member company of the American Mold Builders Association. 

The company also earned the Society of Plastics Engineers’ (SPE) 2003 Mold Designer of the Year Award.  Donna puts it down to her company’s commitment to advancing its manufacturing capabilities and she’s obviously pleased to be honored by her peers. 

“I was surprised,” she comments, “and I feel very good about what we’ve accomplished here.  I have a great group of people around me that help make it all happen.” 

She also likes to leave some things to one’s curiosity about her and her company. 

“I have a mystery about me, being a woman,” she says, laughing.  “They don’t know how I’m doing it…and I don’t want to give away too much information.” 

From what everyone can see, however, it looks like she’s leading Prestige in the right direction. 

For more information on Prestige Mold, call 909-980-6600 or visit the company’s website: www.prestigemold.com.

PART I. 

Read Part II on Prestige Mold in the April 30^th edition of the Tooling Progress Report. 

To find out more about Prestige Mold, call 909-980-6600 or visit the company’s website: www.prestigemold.com.