Contract Manufacturing Profile
Among Milacron’s greatest assets in securing contract business, however, is the company’s sizeable, highly-skilled and flexible manufacturing workforce of about 230 workers, 175 of whom are machinists. “We have a higher skill set. All of our machinists must be able to read their own blueprints, do their own setups,” Kinze said. “The rest of the people are support people, manufacturing engineers, production control. … We do our NC programming in house.”
With their large, highly-skilled workforce and varied techni- cal capabilities, Milacron also does some machine refurbish- ing in its contract manufacturing operations.
Planning Ahead
Managing the contract manufacturing business has not been much of a change or difficulty for Milacron, Kinzie said. That’s because the plants already operated on a contract- or customer-focused basis internally, with different parts of the business placing orders to the manufacturing operations.
“It’s not easy, but we try and treat every order as if it’s from an external customer,” Kinzie said. “We have five different internal customers because the businesses for the injection, ex- trusion and other business units, they all submit orders to us.” That makes the contract customers “just another customer,” he explained.
Because most Milacron jobs are smaller and custom, ver- sus large automated operations, Kinzie said, “We do an awful lot of capacity planning. We move around the machinery. … We have the ability to move people around. We have to be very flexible.” And fast. “We’re able to provide that customiza- tion as rapidly as possible.”
Milacron uses J.D. Edwards EntepriseOne ERP software to manage its capacity and other operations. Typically, the machinery side of Milacron forecasts its sales about six months in advance, leaving the machining operation to book its excess capacity. Virtually all machines are built to order, with very few stock machines. ME
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ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com | October 2013
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