060
COMPANY FOCUS
Forme Technologies – Breaking the mould Originally set up as a ‘Mom-and-Pop’ business producing relatively standard plastic components, Forme Technologies has managed an impressive transition to become an advanced manufacturing company offering innovative solutions and specialist expertise for clients in highly demanding sectors. By William Poole.
Forme Technologies has invested heavily in state-of-the-art machinery and in automating its production processes.
The company that would eventually become Forme Technologies started life in the early 1990s, when Charles Land established CL Plastics in Melbourne’s south-east suburbs. For its first decade in business the company achieved a solid degree of success as a contract manufacturer of plastic components. In the mid-2000s it was acquired by the Anderson family investor group, with Mirko Tappero appointed as General Manager shortly after that. Since then the business has undergone a significant modernisation process, as well as a name change. “The company started out as a nicely run ‘Mom-and-Pop’ sort of organisation, and I think we’ve turned it into a fairly sizable player in the industry,” says Tappero. “We’ve spent a lot of money on automation, mechanisation, streamlining processes and just getting smarter about how we do things. Our biggest investment over the last five or six years has been very modern machinery, coupled with a lot of automation. That’s probably the biggest way the organisation has changed.” Today Forme operates out of three factories, all within walking distance in Carrum Downs – a fourth site, next door to the head office, is due to commence operations later this year (more on that later). While it nowadays employs a team of around 30 staff, its extensive investments in technology have seen a drop in the number directly involved on the shopfloor. “When we took this thing on, we had eight machines on the floor and we employed about 14, maybe 16 people out on the factory floor,” Tappero adds. “Today we’ve got 12 machines and five people on the floor, purely by virtue of automation. It’s gone from a lot of people on a few machines to very few people on a whole bunch of machines.” As well as upgrading and automating its processes, Forme also has a fully equipped clean room, and recently it installed its own tool room; while most of its production tooling is sourced externally, this new facility allows it to undertake more prototyping and product development work in-house. “We’ve put in a small but nicely sophisticated tooling facility of our own, which means we can hop in and out of there as and when we see fit. It’s been one of the absolute best things we’ve done.” All these efforts to enhance the company’s technical capabilities
AMT AUG/SEP 2020
haven’t been undertaken without a broader ambition in mind. While plastics remains at the core of everything it does, Forme has spent the last few years carving out a distinct niche for itself as an advanced manufacturing business specialising in providing comprehensive design and engineering solutions, and the manufacture of sophisticated, high-precision plastic components. “Historically, we were pretty much a ‘me too’ sort of organisation,” says Tappero. “Somebody came to us with a piece they wanted moulded, and we converted it into a piece of plastic. These days we’re getting involved more at the conceptual level, working with people who have designs or ideas in mind, and literally taking it from a concept, through prototyping, through all the engineering levels, and finally the piece of plastic that pops out at the end. We’ve invested heavily in engineering skillsets just to be able to play at that level.” Today the company services a broad array of clients across some of the most demanding manufacturing sectors. Medical accounts for a key part of Forme’s business. Another major area is in the manufacture of housings and encapsulations for electronics, though this goes beyond simple moulded parts on which circuitry can be mounted – for example, Forme was recently closely involved in the design and development of a helipad landing light, a product with an exacting set of specifications in terms of loads, impacts, weathering and so on. The company does still take on a certain amount of less sophisticated work as well, though Tappero stresses this is more out of necessity than choice: “Being an Australian company, you’ve got to do what you can to keep the doors open. So we’ve got the odd job that we probably don’t like doing but we have to. We’ve got a little bit of the ‘rats-and-mice’ stuff. But we try not to play that game as much as possible; we don’t do buckets and basins and bottletops. Even CL Plastics never lived in that space. It always had a portfolio of products that was above the ‘rats-and-mice’ stuff.” In the last couple of years the team’s expertise in materials means metal replacement has been a big part of its activities, taking components typically made from aluminium and converting them into plastic, with all the engineering challenges that come with that.
