C&J Industries evolves to meet customer demand

C&J Industries, a 215,000ft² operation in Meadville, Pennsylvania, offers plastic injection molding backed by quality and engineering support – and recently expanded its operation to meet growing customer demand.

The company launched in 1962 and offers ISO 13485 and 9001 certified and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and UL registered, Class 8 Cleanroom Molding, Class 7 Cleanroom Assembly, and White Room Molding.

“C&J actually started out as a tool and die shop, just building the actual molds,” says Director of Sales and Estimating John Carpenter. “After a few years, they got a couple of customers asking them to sample the molds before they sent them. They said, ‘Well, we don’t have any presses.’ A couple other, bigger customers actually sent them a press, so they started sampling molds. Then they had a couple more customers say, ‘Well, can you run some low-volume stuff for us?’ So, they started running production. It bloomed from there where we became a full, custom injection molding operation.”

The company shifted from automotive to medical manufacturing throughout the years; in 1982, C&J Industries officially became an FDA-registered medical device manufacturer. The company built its first cleanroom that year and started producing medical injection molded components and complete medical devices. It now has more than 300 employees, operates 57 presses, and offers in-house tooling with a 10-year warranty on its molds.

In 2016, C&J Industries created an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), making it a 100% employee-owned company.

“When the final owner retired in 2016, he didn’t want the business to move out of the community,” Carpenter says. “They’re really big in the community. They really like Meadville; they didn’t want the company to leave. So, instead of selling it off to someone, he put his 50% into an ESOP.”

Growing with the customers

C&J Industries differentiates itself through the quality and engineering support it offers its customers, a strategy that’s helped it grow its client base and its footprint.

After customers began approaching the C&J Industries team with a few projects that were too large for the operation to handle, the company underwent a 25,000ft² expansion, growing to four cleanrooms for molding and four for assembly.

“The cleanroom expansion was basically dictated by one of our current customers and a very large project he wants to take on,” Carpenter says. “We didn’t have the floor space for another one of our larger customers that’s growing with us; they wanted to send to us probably 15 to 20 molds they wanted us to take over, and they’re high-volume parts. We didn’t have the capacity with the current rooms and current presses to handle all that new business. So, we made the decision to expand if we wanted to keep rolling with these customers.”

C&J Industries is embracing automation as part of its expansion – new equipment takes five different molded parts and assembles them together, so workers just have to fill the hoppers in each work cell with the various parts. Then, the assembly machine works as a carousel, visiting each station, and assembling the different parts.

“One part’s being assembled every second, so it’s a very high-speed piece of equipment,” Carpenter says, adding that C&J Industries expects the machine to assemble roughly 20 million parts per year.

Producing lightweight, cost-effective components

The plastic injection molding process starts with pellets roughly the size of a pen tip. This raw material is dumped into a hopper on top of the press and travels down into a barrel that’s heated and turned as the plastic melts. Then, it’s injected through a nozzle into the actual cavity of the mold. The molds have water lines that allow cold water to turn the plastic back into a solid to be removed from the molds.

C&J Industries produces several parts used in respiratory medical devices and breathing treatments targeting asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The company also manufactures syringes in various sizes, as well as some surgical devices and parts that go into R&D equipment for testing labs.

Plastic injection molding offers several benefits, Carpenter says, including producing a lightweight component with antibacterial properties at a low cost.

“With our medical materials, they’ll have antibacterial additives to them, so you don’t worry about bacteria,” he says. “But the real benefit when you’re trying to decide whether you want to have stainless steel or plastic really comes down to volume. If you’re making something low volume, return on investment (ROI) might need 100 or 1,000 pieces, and you might not be bad going with stainless steel because you can just machine those 100 or 1,000 pieces. But if you’re into something that’s a higher volume – like a lot of things we do might be 100 million – then sitting there trying to machine 100 million parts of stainless steel is going to take a very long time and be very expensive.”

While building plastic molds can have a higher upfront cost – each mold can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars – Carpenter says the ROI tends to be better on plastic than stainless steel.

“Once you divide the cost of that mold over those 100 million parts, it’s going to be much less expensive to do something in plastic than stainless steel,” he says.

While stainless steel tends to be reusable and plastic is often used once, Carpenter says there has been a push for recyclable components in the past couple years, and C&J Industries is exploring ways to use recyclable materials in its medical parts.

“There are just so many benefits for using plastic,” he says. “Even though people don’t like to hear of one-use throw away, there’s less risk for contamination. Even when you’re sterilizing something stainless steel, handling it over and over again is not as ideal as just using a one-use plastic part that you know is sterile already and then it’s discarded once you’re done with it.”

Automating to benefit workers

C&J industries has implemented high-speed automation throughout the years that Carpenter says was initially aimed at addressing the labor shortage the company experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic but has since shifted to benefit workers by allowing them to pursue more skilled jobs.

“We were down probably 50 workers from our pre-COVID numbers,” he says. “The worst time of COVID, we were down about 70 workers. We still had to keep getting the parts out the door, and we tried everything to get more workers and we couldn’t for a while.”

While the company is fully staffed again, it has kept the automation it implemented during the pandemic, including cobot robotic arms.

“The nice thing about a cobot is it can work right alongside a person because they have pressure sensors in them,” Carpenter says. “Some high-speed robot arms you have to put cages around because they move so fast, and if they hit somebody, it would injure them. The cobots move slower and they’re safer because if they sense they hit somebody or something, they automatically stop. We came up with our own design of automation using a Keyence vision system that talked to the robotic arm that would help it locate a part. The parts coming to the robot didn’t have to be orientated in the correct position; the Keyence system would tell the arm how to turn to pick it up.”

The cobots are used at the end of a press where a person would normally take the parts off the press and put them in a box. Carpenter says this allows C&J Industries to put workers in more skilled positions where they are less likely to get injured.

“There’s a lot of repetitive motion, which is not ergonomically good for a person,” he says. “So even now that our numbers are back up, we can use workers where their skill and knowledge are more valuable rather than doing something repetitive for eight hours. So, we still use those cobots today for repetitive-motion tasks.”

Pivoting to meet evolving needs

C&J Industries doesn’t plan to stop growing after its recent cleanroom expansion – Carpenter says the company will continue pivoting to meet customers’ evolving needs.

In the short term, C&J Industries plans to grow its tool shop, and the team is actively looking for more equipment to add to this area of the business, including a CMM machine.

“When we get a large package of 10 or 15 molds all at once, it overloads our tool shop, so we have to farm some of that out to some local shops, which is good for the community and it helps everybody, but obviously, we’d rather keep as much of that in house as we can,” Carpenter says. “As we’re expanding and as we’re getting more business, we’re really trying to grow our tool shop.”

C&J Industries would also like to provide two-shot injection molding, which allows the molding of two different materials at the same time.

“When it comes to medical components, that’s used a lot with surgical devices that might have a handle on them. You still need the structure and rigidity of the unit – you have the hard substrate – but for ergonomics, the surgeons like to have that soft padding right where their palm goes. So, then you can do that padding right there and in another material.”

C&J Industries purchased a two-shot press a few years ago and built its own molds to start understanding the process, but this year the company will market its two-shot molding abilities to customers.

The company will also pursue additional automation.

“It’s just becoming ingrained in every department now to find new ways to be more efficient in what we do,” Carpenter says. “I think that’s helping us keep our costs down and get more parts out to our customers.”

About the author: Melissa Schiller is senior editor of Today’s Medical Developments.