Automation

With another year making its way out the door, it’s a great time to reflect on where our industry is heading. Below are a few of the trends we believe will affect plastics professionals and consumers in the months ahead. The Search Continues for Lighter Weight Parts While not exactly a new trend, the search continues to find lightweight solutions for many of today’s top industries. Nowhere is this truer than in the automotive industry, where environmental concerns are making

After the mass exodus of a number of high-profile manufacturers who moved their productions overseas in the past decades, many American companies have begun looking for ways to remain competitive in the marketplace without sacrificing their domestic manufacturing operations. To this end, many of those companies have turned to automation. Are you trying to decide if manufacturing automation is the right choice for your products? Before you get started, take some time to answer

AUTOMATION AS A COMPETITIVE TOOL After years of watching U.S. manufacturing move overseas to countries with low labor costs and seemingly endless capacity, the U.S. reshoring movement has officially begun. No longer content to suffer from the faulty production, miscommunication, and long lead times often associated with outsourced production, today’s product developers are looking for ways to keep manufacturing at home while still remaining competitive in the global marketpla

THE EVOLVING MANUFACTURING LANDSCAPE The plastic injection molding market continues to evolve, creating greater specialization and more technological advancements than ever before. But alas, it seems some pressures never change. Lower costs! Higher quality! Greater productivity! The refrain remains the same but the pressure only increases. That’s why you need a plastics manufacturer with plenty of tools to help you combat these challenges and stay competitive. How do we do it

NEW OPPORTUNITIES IN MANUFACTURING AUTOMATION These days no manufacturing production is completely devoid of automation, but new opportunities pop up daily to automate additional processes. This can help speed up your production, improve part consistency and quality, and often reduce manufacturing production costs. But for some products it may not be as clear whether adding more automation will also add more value, whether it’s due to intricate assembly requirements or a lac

ECONOMIES OF SCALE Once upon a time, the key to maintaining a competitive edge as a manufacturer rested almost solely on ensuring economies of scale; the faster and more cheaply you were able to produce, the better. Sure, you hoped at the end you would have quality products that worked as planned but the majority of your time was spent figuring out how to reduce costs by doing more and doing it faster. Offshoring production to countries with low wages and high capacity became

Back in March of 2013 KASO Plastics added a new line of window and door accessories including handles, rollers, weephole covers, and latches. During the process of transitioning this new product line to our injection molding manufacturing and assembly facility in Vancouver, Washington, we conducted a thorough product review to see where we could gain efficiencies. The video below gives a short overview of how we were able to automate the assembly of our brass wheel roller li