Contract Manufacturing Profile
“Our niche is low volume, high technology,” said Jim Kinzie, plant manager, Milacron, Mount Orab Operations. Kinzie, who has worked in various positions at Milacron during his 42 years with the company, explained that the large vises, injection screws and fabricated or cast-iron bases that Milacron manufactures for its plastic extru- sion, blow-molding and injection-molding machines makes Milacron especially capable to make smaller lots of large items. “The machinery to make the parts is pretty much the same,” he said. Vanzant added: “We have capability up to about 60-ton
parts.”
Milacron’s contract business has grown to more than $8 million in sales annually, which Vanzant called “a small part of total sales, but an important diversification tool.” The company learned how important that diversification was during the Great Recession, when the machinery side of the business took a severe hit. During that period, the contract
manufacturing business made up nearly 40% of the ship- ment’s out of the Mr. Orab plant. “It was a boon to us during that period,” Vanzant said. And while Milacron still had to lay off workers, he noted that without the contract business: “It would have been worse.” Today, Milacron has come to consider this contract manu- facturing business, once meant only as a offset to use excess manufacturing capacity, as highly important to the overall busi- ness strategy. “We will subcontract Milacron work to maintain our contract business,” Kinzie said, explaining: “Once you lose it, you won’t get it back. The problem with turning it on and off is losing customers. We try and keep the contract work growing no matter how business at Milacron is doing. We need to be able to fall back on that.”
The contract manufacturing business does have some boundaries to its growth, however. Milacron will not compete with its machinery customers. Because those customers are
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ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com | October 2013
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