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A Look Back at the History of Team 1 Plastics

As part of the year-long celebration of its 30th anniversary, Team 1 Plastics, a plastic injection molding company for the automotive industry, is highlighting different milestones in its history through a series of articles. This month’s article features the impact that automation has had on Team 1 Plastics.

Team 1 Plastics is a state-of-the-art injection-molding company. Each of its injection molding presses is outfitted with some type of automation, but that hasn’t always been the case.

“We had no automation when we started Team 1 Plastics,” said Team 1’s Vice-President and co-owner, Gary Grigowski. “We didn’t even have conveyors. That’s what a lot of shops looked like when we went into business. It wasn’t like robots weren’t around, but their price point was very high.”

Grigowski said that production in the early days of Team 1 Plastics was very labor intensive. Many jobs required an operator to be at the press the whole time it was running — for example, if the press was molding a delicate part that could scratch if dropped on top of another part. Grigowski described the process that the operator would follow. “The part would fall into a cushioned tub, and the operator would pull it away before the next one would come through so it wouldn’t drop on top of it. The operator would inspect the part very carefully, make a gate cut [removing the part from the excess material], and carefully pack it in a box. Then, the operator would sit there waiting for the next part to be produced.” And Grigowski added, “Not only was this inefficient from a labor standpoint, it also presented the risk of repetitive motion injuries.”

It was in the early 1990s that Team 1 Plastics began investing in automation. The company purchased its first sprue picker – a robot that takes the runner out of the injection molding press. The next level of automation the company invested in was indexing conveyors.

Then, the company began purchasing pick-and-place robots. The pick-and-place robot, in combination with an end-of-arm tool, could extract the part, make the gate cut, and place it on an indexing conveyor. It was no longer necessary to have one operator at each injection molding press. Grigowski explained that the Team Member didn’t have to make the cut nor did (s)he have to go to the press on every cycle. (S)he could float around to several presses in an area. When a conveyor was getting full, the Team Member would quickly inspect the parts and pack them.

Next, the company added diverters so that when the alarm on an injection molding press sounded or the press identified bad parts, the bad parts would be automatically segregated from the good parts. Full servo cutting robots were next, making the gate cuts more efficient. The latest level of automation in which Team 1 Plastics has invested is SCARA robots which can very gently pack parts into densely populated trays.

Grigowski said that with each piece of automation, the pay-back of savings due to reduced labor cost was about a year or less. The company was continually able to do more with less people. Automation, he said, has allowed the company “… to grow without adding as many employees as we would have otherwise. And when you look at the challenges we have in competing within the NAFTA region, especially with the much lower labor cost shops that are down in Mexico, it would have difficult for us to survive if we would have not pursued automation.”

But reduced labor cost is not the only impact that automation has had on Team 1 Plastics. “We had to go through a culture change of how we solved problems and how we prioritize problems,” Grigowski said. “As we became more automated, it became apparent that we had to make larger investments upfront in trying to get the tool and the process right the first time.” He explained that “when you had a person sitting at every press, and a problem came up, it was very easy to just have them trim flash or check for shorts in the dead time between cycles. But, when you’re automated, and you have one person that’s responsible for two or three presses in the bigger zone — or up to 10 in the small zone — that just doesn’t cut it. It’s just not possible anymore for one person to inspect every part.”

Automation also caused Team 1 Plastics to make some infrastructure changes. Technical talent was needed to program the robots. “Robots are pretty stupid. They do exactly what you tell them. If they expect the part to be sitting in a particular location on an end-of-arm tool, it’s got to be right there. We had to have someone who could think like that and who was mechanically inclined and had the ability to work with the program in the robot.”

Other things – such as where do you store end-of-arm tools so they don’t get damaged? how do you specify all the settings on the set-up sheet? where are the stop points on the robots? how do you make the production areas containing robots safe for the operators? how often do you have to sharpen the cutters? – had to be addressed. Grigowski said, “There were a lot of things that we had to do now that we didn’t have to do before.”

Team 1 Plastics has also been impacted by information automation. Grigowski said, “We don’t have someone punching in every order. We’re exploiting EDI  [electronic data interchange]. We have very good scheduling programs that allow us to spend just a little time every day as compared to before when it was 100% of someone’s job. So, it’s impacted people throughout all skill levels of the company because we’ve taken away some of the repetitive tasks that they used to do. A computer now does it, and they are required to think at a higher level. It has raised the bar of the analytical skills and cognitive ability for the people that we hire.”

Fortunately, for Team 1 Plastics and its Team Members, there have been minimal job losses due to the addition of automation. Because the company was experiencing growth during the time periods when it was introducing automation into production, Grigowski said that the reduction of staff was accomplished by either attrition or hire avoidance.

In thinking back on the impact that automation has had on Team 1 Plastics, Grigowski agrees with the statement that Team 1 Plastics probably would not have survived to celebrate its 30th anniversary if it had not invested so heavily in automation. He said, “That’s probably very true, or we would look like a very different company. As it stands now, we’re competitive within our NAFTA region. In many cases, we compete favorably against Mexico, but we have to pick the right products and we have to automate them, and we have to deliver a very smooth launch experience for the customer or it becomes very difficult for us to grow our business.”