Viewpoint: Production-Ready Prototyping, by Mark Rathbone, CEO

The auto industry relies on prototype components for evaluation and testing during the product-development process. In the case of injection-molded plastic components, however, the tooling often used to make prototypes is not durable enough to support full-scale production. Yet making the transition can threaten a product launch if the required tooling-often sourced offshore these days-isn't ready in time.

PTI Engineered Plastics Corp. has innovated a prototyping process called P3™ that creates ready-for-production prototypes with tooling durable enough to mold and support substantial production quantities.

PTI CEO Mark Rathbone says P3 helps customers cut costs and keep product launches on track, especially when there are problems with traditional production tooling. In a competitive industry, PTI has identified a service that continues to present opportunities. To accommodate increasing interest and demand for its services, the 25-year-old company will move into a larger, newly constructed engineering and manufacturing facility this summer.

What is P3?

It means PTI Production Prototype™. It's our hybrid approach to moving components more quickly from prototype into actual production. Typically there are compromises when you make a prototype part. With traditional rapid prototyping, you modify the intended design to get parts made quickly for validation testing. But you can't actually use those components in production because they are not representative of the final part. With P3, the prototype and production part are identical.

How does that save time and money?

Traditional tooling costs can be high, because the industry is accustomed to specifying tooling with a life of millions of pieces, even when only a fraction of that volume is required over the product life of the program. Our sweet spot is the large number of programs that only require 90,000 pieces or less. That's where PTI can save its customers both cost and time.

We can effectively tailor our customer's tooling to suit actual production requirements. We recently did a program for a major automotive supplier that saved their company more than $200,000 over 24 months with tooling that took them from design to production validation in only 10 weeks.

The P3 process permits use of nontraditional materials such as aluminum or S7 steel to create tooling for the prototype part you want with no compromise to design integrity, part geometry or material-and then quickly move it into production. Many of our customers use this unique capability as a kind of "launch insurance" policy, because our tooling often provides enough capacity to forego the need for traditional tooling.

Our message is: Do not compromise your product launch timetable. Whether your production needs take you offshore or not, PTI can deliver the same part, do it locally, and assure your timely start of production as well as support your early production needs until your intended source is up and running.

How do costs compare?

In plastic molding, the traditional focus has been on piece price predicated by volume. That encourages plastic molders to use tooling out of hardened steel and add lots of mechanical features to increase productivity. A complex tool might cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and make parts that cost less than a dollar apiece. Today, with customers taking a keener focus on overall program costs, tooling and piece price options have become very attractive. With PTI, you may get the option to pay less than $100,000 for tooling on the same part, but yielding a higher piece cost. The piece price may be higher, but the total program cost over the life of the product is lower. It all depends on the project's volume.

What types of products does PTI make?

Our automotive clients look to us for production-ready prototypes, engineering for manufacturability, and production capabilities from our vertically integrated services, which also include product development design. We work with all engineering-grade thermoplastics and our production parts vary in size from a pinhead to 30 inches square. Our P3 service focuses on short-run and relatively lower-volume projects, but high-value components.

We manufacture molded components for mechanical, electrical, electro-mechanical, closures and alternative fuel systems. In addition, we provide design-to-production services to the medical and consumer products markets.

To learn more about PTI's capabilities, contact Talei Berger at (586) 263-3956 or tberger@teamPTI.com.

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