Modern Plastics Worldwide - July/August 2009 - dae uptlax

SPOTLIGHT
WITH C&J INDUSTRIES
Dennis Frampton touts
innovation, training, and
continuous improvement.
Some of the 250 staff members have
indeed been active at the company for
the last 30 years, says Dennis Frampton,
company president. Investing in
staff means paying tuition for continuing
education (the company budgets
about $100,000/yr for in-plant seminars
and tuition), something Frampton says
is a given at his company but amazingly
not at many other molders and
tool builders throughout the country.
“Everybody in our sector is searching
for good staff, but they’re not creating
them themselves,” he says. The
company’s founder, Dick Johnston,
who died in 2007, so believed in his
employees that he gave 49% of the
company to them, leaving the rest to
the immediate family, including sonin-law
Frampton.
“My father-in-law was grateful for
what the staff did for the company
because our success to a large part is due
to employee loyalty and involvement,” he
says. The company started in a two-car
garage in 1962 as a mold builder called
Meadville Precision Tool and Mold. By
the end of the first decade it had grown to
10 employees. Today it turns out between
75-100 molds/yr, mainly produced on
50 JULY/AUGUST 2009 • MODERN PLASTICS WORLDWIDE mpw.plasticstoday.com
West
Buffalo
Meadville
Pittsburgh
Clarksburg
Pennsylvania
Philadelph
MD
Ba
Wa
Plastics contract molder and product
designer C&J Industries (Meadville, PA)
reckons investing in its employees is its
best opportunity to ensure a healthy future.
high-speed milling
machines that
reduce the delivery
times to customers
versus that which
spark erosion and
polishing processes
previously dictated.
Frampton says the company rather
fell into injection molding during the
1970s by acquiring two used presses
because one of its tooling customers
wanted the mold builder to qualify
molds prior to shipment, but C&J didn’t
have presses. “One of the best things to
ever happen to C&J was that we got out
of molding for the automotive sector and
concentrated on precision applications
for medical device, electrical/electronics,
and telecommunication sectors,” he says.
One high profile but low volume customer
is Segway, maker of the personal
transporter.
Frampton also credits high use of
automation and a movement toward
more cleanroom molding as helping to
sustain business, with the company adding
cleanroom processing in the early
1980s. He proudly points to a complex
64-cavity medical cap mold the company
designed and is using to supply the pharmaceutical
sector (see photo, above).
Today the company has 48 presses ranging
from 22-720 tonnes clamping force,
almost exclusively Toshiba electrics.
C&J has plans to replace all its presses
by 2015 in order to maintain its level of
Meadville, PA
technology. Frampton also says during
the 1990s C&J noticed how many customers
reduced their engineering staffs,
so the molder sagely decided to offer
product design as a service.
C&J holds monthly improvement
meetings to hone the company’s procedures.
One success Frampton points to
was simply to move the tool building,
which was located three miles away, to
the molding and design operations. “We
were able to reduce scrap by 80% due
to better communications between engineers
and tool makers,” he says. Another
improvement was the creation of separate
incoming and outgoing warehousing
facilities to avoid any possible mix-ups
that could affect its medical device business.
The company has also taken on the
responsibility of JIT parts delivery via the
Internet to oversee customers’ inventory
and relieve the client of such work.
Frampton decided in 1967 to follow
the footsteps of his father, who worked
as a mold builder at the company, by
applying for a die apprenticeship. Working
full time and attending university
in the evenings to obtain his bachelor
degree kept him busy outside and within
company operations, where he also met
his soon-to-be wife, Diann, an art student
who was working at her father’s
company. Frampton worked his way up
the ladder while they raised their family,
eventually becoming president.
Robert Colvin • robert.colvin@cancom.com