12 PERSPECTIVES AW FEBRUARY 2022
Trademark Plastics Adapts to Market Changes with ERP By David Greenfield
Director of Content/Editor-in-Chief
Trademark Plastics Inc. cross-trains machine operators to be the first line of quality by inspecting parts at the molding machine.
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iverside, Calif. based Trademark Plastics Inc. (TPI) is a manufacturer of injection-molded parts. With eight of the world’s top 30 medical device manufacturers among its customers, 85% of TPI’s business comes from the creation of medical components for these customers. With COVID-19 roiling healthcare operations for nearly two years, adjusting operations to the quickly changing realities facing the medical community has proved to be a constantly moving goal. Fortunately, keeping pace with its customers during the pandemic did not require extensive adjustments to TPI’s operating processes because of the company’s long-standing investments in automation and related data acquisition and analytics. TPI uses more than 50 machines to create components along with a Zeiss Metrotom 800 computerized tomography scanning machine to con-
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duct x-ray inspections on all products. Data from the machines in TPI’s facility are fed into the DelmiaWorks manufacturing enterprise resource planning (ERP) system (formerly known as IQMS, which was acquired by Dassault Systèmes in 2019). The information in the ERP software is then used to provide real-time alerts as well as generate nearly 20 different reports in SAP Crystal Reports (which provide detailed data analyses). Data from TPI’s SolidWorks computer-aided design (CAD) software creates the bills of material (BOMs) used by DelmiaWorks system to track materials and the status of each project. “Everything is connected here at Trademark, from the material to miscellaneous items to robots, injection molding, and machine information, and it’s all located in DelmiaWorks,” says Bryan Barrera, chief operating officer at TPI.
Problem identification
To quickly identify potential issues during production, TPI uses real-time monitoring displays on the shop floor. Color-coding helps employees see whether production is running efficiently (green), running faster than planned (black), or deviating from set parameters (red). “The system can tell you, for example, if you’re scheduled to produce 100 million components per day and your costs, and it’s going to let you know in real time whether or not you’re hitting your goals,” says David Carty, chief executive officer at TPI. “Also, when you see a red light pop up, possibly with some audio, you can go to a technician right then to troubleshoot the issue; whereas in the past, it might have been left alone for a couple hours, increasing the scrap ratio.” “If our scrap report shows that we have a splay issue, the engineers can check if
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