DELIVERING HIGH QUALITY TOOLS

Based in Amherst, NH, Poly-Ject is a custom plastic injection molding shop that provides end-to-end services including design, rapid prototyping, moldmaking and plastic injection molding.

The company was started in 1982 by Larry Thibeault in the basement of his house. Today, the company has 17+ employees working out of a 25,000ft2 facility, serving a diverse customer base.

A large portion of the business is repeat orders from customers who keep coming back to Poly-Ject for the high quality products and one-stop solution provided by the company. "Our strength is in the integration of the services we provide," Thibeault says. "We can do everything from the part design and the tool design to the actual manufacturing.

When we do the design we think ahead to how the tool is going to be built and how the part is going to be manufactured, so that the mold can be made very efficiently." Despite the current economic downturn, Poly-Ject's toolmaking business has not seen any slowdown. "Many of our customers' sales are down 30% to 40%, but they are still making new products and need new tools," Thibeault says. "The biggest change we have seen over the years is the reduced lead time. That is also the biggest challenge today: How do you deliver tools that are competitively priced at two thirds of the time you were taking to build them two years ago?" To address these challenges and stay competitive, Poly-Ject has been searching for ways to streamline its processes. For more than 10 years Poly-Ject had used another CAD/CAM system. "Overtime, we came to realize that it was not keeping up with the pace we needed. It was inefficient and really slowing us down," Thibeault explains.

So the time came to start looking at other software and what they could save by investing in the right package."When we looked at Cimatron, we could immediately see that it was a perfect fit for us. Cimatron enables us to do everything we need - from part design to tool design and NC - in one package. It matches our philosophy of providing customers with a one-stop solution to their needs." According to Thibeault, the transition to Cimatron was quick and smooth. "I found it to be fairly intuitive.

In addition, Cimatron's tech support is the best in the industry. Being ex-toolmakers, they understand how molds and tools work." Thibeault estimates that Cimatron has helped Poly-Ject slash about 40% from the time required for design and machining. "Having one integrated package where everything is created in a single file has significantly streamlined the design process," he says.

Cimatron's ability to produce high quality toolpaths is another major advantage.

The other CAD/CAM "cutter paths did not have smooth motions and transitions, which required us to do more polishing and EDMing," Thibeault says. "With Cimatron, we are able to use more high-speed cutting and get better quality finishes in a fraction of the time." Running machines unattended is another important part of Poly-Ject's strategy for maintaining efficiency and speed. "Cimatron keeps track of what has been cut and what still needs to be cut so well that I feel very confident leaving the machines unattended at night," Thibeault states.

One of the recent projects delivered by Poly-Ject provides a good example for how it is able to step up to customer demands and even bring work to the United States that was supposed to be done overseas. "It was a two-cavity injection mold, and each part required three separate side actions, or pulls, with one of these pulls on a compound angle. Our customer's sister company in Germany could not get it done in the timeframe needed. They asked for help from their U.S. counterpart, and they came to us and said they needed the mold built in four weeks. This was just the second project we did with Cimatron, and we were able to do it in three-and-one-half weeks."

Cimatron Technologies Inc.
Novi, MI
cimatrontech.com