Part one of a two part series

Pro Mold & Die in Roselle, IL, is a successful manufacturing company that specializes in both die cast dies and injection molds for plastic. The company’s roots lay in building injection molds for the toy industry as well as for highly detailed kits for Monogram Models. Walter Schaub, who co-owns the company with David Long, says the pair had no idea they’d branch into building die cast dies, especially as quickly as they did.

"We opened our doors in 1973," says Schaub, "and we founded the company primarily to build toys, as toy manufacturing companies were the best connections we had in the industry. The owner of a magnesium die casting company, which was located down the street, saw us moving our Bridgeports in and he asked if we’d be interested in building dies. We’d never done that before, but he said he’d help us with the differences in building dies. The first job he gave us was dies for automotive starter housings."

The rest is, as they say, history.

Says Schaub, "We planned on building injection molds for toys, automotive and model kits. In fact, many of the kits we built over 25 years ago, including those for the model B-17 Bomber, are still being produced today from those original tools. Our general experience was in automotive work, such as taillight lenses, parking and turn lenses and other similar products."

Such well-known names in the toy industry as Mattel, Hasbro, Kenner, Playschool, Milton Bradley, Tootsie Toy and Strombecker were among Pro Mold’s early customers. But Schaub says he and Long started to move out of the toy business within five years of opening their company as the market was moving to Asia and they discovered that building die cast dies for aluminum and magnesium parts was a better choice in the long term.

"Those first starter parts evolved into building dies for cast magnesium chainsaw housings," he explains. "They were good-sized, complex dies and eventually that led us to dies for computer products for customers out on the west coast. At that time, many computer parts and bar code readers required die cast parts due to their rigidity and heat tolerance, so this exposed yet another industry for Pro Mold & Die to service."

Pro Mold builds dies for automotive trans extensions, intake manifolds, diesel engine covers and a top-of-the-line vacuum cleaner manufacturer. As the years pass, the company’s reach

"With global competition building, Pro Mold has seen a good deal of customers going off-shore for plastic molds and now die cast dies with marginal success," Schaub explains. "We’ve followed this with great interest over the past few years and believe it’s similar to looking for a supplier here in the U.S. by opening a telephone book and letting your fingers do the walking, instead of going by the "Three R’s – Reputation, Referral and Relationships.

"The feedback is that the quality hasn’t been what Pro Mold produces and we continually strive to be price competitive," he continues, with obvious pride in his voice. "Pro Mold does take global competition very seriously and will continue to redefine how molds are manufactured."

These events did not happen without effort, of course, and Schaub will tell you straight out that he believes it’s because of the changes he and Long have made in the plant’s operations and the company’s credo to "do whatever it takes" to make the customer happy.

Technology and Tenacity

Continually updating the Pro Mold plant and how the company operates has been a primary focus over the past 8-10 years, according to Schaub.

"We build the same inserts today that we built in 1987 but for less cost," he says, for example. "Improvements in our operations and how we conduct business are the reasons we meet our objectives to continually reduce costs," he says.

He gives yet another example of how things have improved: "On a recent job more than 38% of our hours were unattended, lowering our overall cost. Through the use of templates standardized by Pro Mold and our in-depth use of Gantt Charts – forecasting, scheduling and tracking our time, both attended and unattended – we’ve got every job and the hours each one took recorded from day one, in 1973. The results of this data has allowed us an on-time delivery rate of 100% since March 2000."

Schaub explains that Pro Mold’s tracking system proves the difference lies in the fact that you cannot take a flat hourly rate as done in the past to compute your costs if you’re working unattended. The more unattended hours on the job, the lower your true manufacturing costs will be. Pro Mold runs a 24/7 operation with staggered shifts, keeping machines running continuously and scheduled to be unattended.

"We bought our first wire EDM in 2001," Schaub says. "We were spending $100,000 annually in wire costs, so it was time to buy. We’ve also standardized machining our own slides and other components where possible to maximize machine usage.

Since 2000 the company has installed two wire EDM’s, a Sodick Hole Popper, a fully automatic large surface grinder and, most recently, a new OKK MCV860 Machining Center – a $400,000 purchase – a couple of weeks ago.

Going Above and Beyond

In part I, we learned of the technological and procedural changes Walter Schaub and David Long, owners of injection mold and die cast die manufacturing company Pro Mold & Die, have made over the last 10 years in order to position the company for success in a global market.  In Part II, find out about some special customer service strategies the company uses to maintain customer loyalty. 

“We service the hell out of our customers,” Walter Schaub, co-owner of Pro Mold & Die in Roselle, IL, says with conviction.  “Whatever they ask for or expect we’ll try to give them.” 

On the injection mold tooling side, he says Pro Mold specializes in everything – automotive forward lighting, thermoset tooling for reflectors, medical tooling, tooling for outdoor power equipment such as lawnmowers, tractors and snow blower equipment, consumer electronics and more. 

“We just build,” he says.  “We recently started a project for a customer that does a lot of work for Mercedes.  They gave us 45 out of 68 molds that they needed built over the last 9 months.  Some of the parts are very complex and needed first sample adjustments for fits.  Changes were made and the tools were back in the press the next day.  This was the case in a number of the molds.  We build inordinately high quality tools.  Our automotive customer that we built the 45 tools for told us it’s the best product launch they’ve had since 1994.  The project manager told me that himself. 

“Up until Motorola moved the majority of their operations to China, we always had two to three prototype handset covers for the cell phones under construction,” he continues.  “We were building some of those molds in 21 day or less, and that’s with lifters and slides.  That’s one of our displays for the trade shows.” 

Pro Mold believes in marketing and working the trade show circuit, and they are present at most major plastics and tooling events such as the very prominent National Plastics Expo (NPE).  More times than not, it results in more contacts and a job or two from the effort, including reconnecting with past customers. 

“I think we’re doing the same volume in sales this year with 20% fewer manufacturing employees, and 20% fewer in the engineering department, too, as we were before times started slowing down a couple of years ago,” he says. 

“We do an awful lot of things for free that ten years ago we probably would have charged for,” adds Schaub.  “Years ago if you designed a tool, the customer signs off on the design but when changes needed to be made, you would charge for it.  Today we don’t.  Whatever needs to be done, we do it.  On some of our molds and die cast dies we have made post sample adjustments free of charge to the customer.  They don’t have a blank check, but we’ll discuss with the customer what their expectations are and we’ll agree to make certain adjustments to the tool at no cost. 

“We offer a limited, excellent warrantee to all our customers,” he continues.  “For example, an old customer came to us, saying his vendor had issues with a die we built six years before.  Rather than dispute it or put our customer in the middle, we built him half of a die for nothing.  In another instance, rather than weld on an insert, we threw it away and made a new one.  We go way above and beyond what our responsibilities are.” 

A service thrown in as part of an injection mold package is a MoldFlow analysis, which they provide in-house – commonly a $2,000-$5,000 value, according to Schaub. 

On average, for tooling valued at $150,000, Pro Mold’s delivery times have gone from 18 weeks down to 12 weeks, he says. 

“We recently took on two molds each worth $240,000 in value,” he says.  “We designed and built them in 14 weeks.  That’s due to new machinery investments, improved engineering, and the way we manufacture tooling.  The way we operate is different than the way we did 10 years ago.  The machining is hands-off as much as possible, running 24 hours a day regardless of the delivery schedule.  This has actually helped us take a 12-week delivery time down to 5 or 5-1/2 weeks and it reduces our overhead costs, too.  I can’t think of anything more expensive than running your machines only 40 hours a week. 

“We like that our customers can rely on us,” Schaub continues.  “We believe in maintaining long-term relationships and not burning any bridges.” 

To find out more about Pro Mold & Die, visit the company’s website at www.promolddie.com, or call 630-893-3594.