On June 16th IMBC Blowmolding hosted the Brampton/Caledon/Orangeville Continuous Improvement Strategic Interest Group session.  Bob Starr, President, gave an very informative overview of IMBC Blowmolding including the challenges the company has overcome and is facing.  This was followed by a plant tour and discussion.

The IMBC Overview:

IMBC Blowmolding has been in operation since 1989. 

The company supplies to a number of different markets including - bottle, automotive parts, pharmaceutical industry, household chemicals - spray bottles, etc., health & beauty industry, food & beverage industry.

85% of their product is exported to the US and 15% supplies companies in Canada.

The company uses 5 different materials - high density polyethylene, PVC, PET & PETG, BAREX, and polypropylene.

The company has watched a lot of orders going to China.  The only advantage that China really has in blowmolding is the labour costs so IMBC needed to reduce the labour involved in order to compete. 

A factor hindering the blowmolding industry in Canada is that over the years Europe invested in new equipment while Canada bought Europe's old equipment - blow and drop machines.  Hence the industry has been somewhat antiquated in North America.  A very rudimentary process with manual removal of scrap from the product was the norm and quality was very manual as well. 

IMBC's mission is to automate, bring pricing down, and reduce labour content.

To that end, IMBC has automated - nobody touches the parts until they come out of the packaging machine.  The industry norm for labour requirements is 22%.  At IMBC it is 4%! 

IMBC has, also, recently, expanded to have a separation of manufacturing and warehousing.  It is easier to oversee the manufacturing process and control the air environment as it is critical to producing successful product (air compressors, chilling in the building and on the roof - humidity, etc.).  The company has already seen an improvement of greater than 5% with only having moved 5 machines so far.

A couple of challenges faced by the company are:

• The complexity of the skill sets required for machine setup - apprenticeship programs have not been as useful as the job requires
• Changeover is an issue - IMBC's is standardized but not straightforward.

The discussion after completing the plant tour centred on:

•  TS16949 certified - the only blow molder that is certified
  • All flows are in flow charted
  • Visual is more easily understood especially with English as a second language workers
• Great facility! Great business!
• MOE difficulties -  have to do a study of anything that vents to the outside and sound measurements to get certification
• Business uncertainties - have to be nimble
• Inventory turns
• "Work expands to fill time."  Time studies done and then manpower assigned accordingly.
• Speed to market issues/opportunities - bringing more  upstream  in house - lead times much quicker than from China - need to be flexible to increase response time