Plastic Spools, Reels, Bobbins for the Textile, Wire and Cable Industries

Company News page 2

Continued from page 1

Customer Driven
Pittsfield Plastics making inroads in textile industry
By Devin Steele

Building on foundation
      The company, under new ownership, has enjoyed early success primarily because "we bought a very well-honed machine, Cooper said.
      "Because of the strength of the people who were here already, Tom (Walker) has been able to focus on sales and I have been able to work closely with the management team on ISO implementation," he added. "Growth has been enhanced by the team that was here."
      Earning ISO-9002 certification in only a year is testament to the fact that the company's roots were well planted, he said.
      "We accomplished something that most companies can't accomplish in such a short period of time, McCuin said. "Our quality control program, which is also part of ISO-9002, has improved 100 fold. We had very, very few customer complaints before and we receive virtually none. We're constantly on guard to make sure our quality is the best it can be."
      Cooper and Walker are part of the management team involved in day-to-day operations. Cooper brings 10 years of engineering and 10 years of banking experience to the enterprise, while Walker has a background in manufacturing, product development, marketing and sales.
      Holmes, who lives in Sarasota, FL, serves as chairman of the board of USCO Distribution Services, a company he has steered to quadruple sales.
      "Tom Holmes was the lightning rod, "Cooper said." In order to buy a business, you need an expert in that business and we found Tom."
      Another plus: Pittsfield is able to use Holmes' warehouses in strategic areas of the South as it expands its textile business there.


Pittsfield Plastics features a state-of-the-art injection molding operation.

Textile expansion
      The company has gone full-bore in its expansion into textiles. "We're taking existing products and making them better," Walker said.
      And results are being produced. For instance, Pittsfield has tripled sales of its 32-ounce king bobbins used in thread and embroidery applications, he said. Everyone's going for a bigger package," Walker said. "We have revamped our whole line with new molds."
      The company also is enhancing its dye and take-up spools, he added.
      What's driving improvement in textile-related products is customers, Walker said.
      "We've taken on a lot of additional products, but we listened to our customers and we reengineered them basically," he said. "We made our products stronger. There are higher demands today for high-speed winding and bigger packages.
      "We can respond so quickly to our customers, it's unbelievable. We had a company in California that wanted a thinner bobbin and we had them one in a week."
      Pittsfield's principals use a term called "whiplash turnaround," meaning they can rapidly turn around customer orders

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Bob Mulvey operates a computer-controlled turning center.

       Walker credited the company's responsiveness, and ultimately its growth, to the tooling operation. The principals have invested heavily in that area by upgrading machines or adding new ones in order to better serve customers' needs. In two years, the department has grown from 14 machines and 49 molds to 18 machines and 70 molds.
      The company also offers customization services for customers who want, say, tubes of varying colors or their name or a motto imprinted on bobbins.

     
        Dennis Melle works in the tooling area.

In addition, many customers' inventories are warehoused for quick delivery. "We call our Just In Time system "Just In Case, " Walker, laughing, said of the warehouse.
      "One of the things that has made us successful and will make us successful in the South is our policy on shipments," Cooper said. What I mean by that is a lot of our customers don't' have big warehouses where the can take 53-foot tractor-trailers, so they need JIT delivery. And that's what we're building in our response times. That's what we're carrying down South. We're going to use our partner's (USCO's) warehousing to deliver JIT until we have a plant down there. So we help our customers manage their inventory."

Customers come first
      Customers, Pittsfield's principals and employees use the word frequently - but not lightly. Cooper speaks philosophically on the subject.
      "There's a business model in a book called In Search of Excellence by (Tom) Peters. In that book the basic philosophy is everybody has got to have customer responsibility, all the way from the top dog to the bottom dog and that's the basic philosophy here," he said. "Our customers are encouraged to come to our plant and see our employees working on their product. When our employees put a face on that customer, all of a sudden that stuff they're putting into that box means a lot to the employees."
      Keeping in contact with customers is important, added McCuin. "No matter how small or how big our customers are, seeing them once every three years doesn't work," he said. "You've got to see them frequently, you've got to shake their hands, you've got to say howdy. They need the personal contact."
      Understanding customers' needs is also critical, said McCuin, whose vast experience in the textile industry prior to joining Pittsfield in 1991 has made him something of an expert in the field.
      "They've come up with the 2-for1 twisters that are extremely fast," he said. "There are so many of the high-speed machines our there now - automatic, semiautomatic. The funny thing is, you go into a plant and next to a $25,000 spindle machine is an old 50 winder or an old Atwood 1958 machine that's still running. You have to know both machines.
      "We're constantly trying to develop better products through experimenting with different materials and there's a lot of new stuff coming out on the market today. You have to keep up with it."
      The company's No. 1 rule: "If you don't take care of your customers," Walker said, as Cooper and McCuin chimed in unison, "somebody else will." He then added: "Sometimes we jump through hoops trying to make a delivery, trying to help people out. All you have to do is help people out. All you have to do is help people once and you've got a friend for life."

Call it being customer driven.

For Immediate Release

Pittsfield Plastics Continues to Raise the Standards in Standard Wire Reels.

(Pittsfield, MA)

The Standard Wire Reel product line at Pittsfield Plastics Engineering has continued to grow…literally. The newest SKU added to their offering is the new 6"x3 ½"x3 ½" model and its barrel wall thickness is a whopping 33% greater than the competition. Other reels of the same size in the market have a wall thickness of .066 and the new product from PittPlas has a wall thickness of .090.

As Tom Walker, a Principal of PittsPlas, reasons, "We've added more beef to the wall to ensure the highest performance in fine wire reel winding for our customers. There's a significant barrel strength advantage over the others currently being offered in the market."

Walker continued, "And with our new 6 ½' x 6 ½" x 3" we've rounded out the whole standard reel line. This, too, will have the .090 wall thickness barrel - ensuring excellent high speed winding results."

Earlier this year PittsPlas introduced improvements in the11 ¾" x 7" and the 8" x 6" standard workhorse reels of the industry.

According to Tom Walker, "Our two new designs of these standard wire reels came from a re-engineering to address the market's concern for flange chipping and breakage. We incorporated an additional row of ribs in the 11 ¾ x 7 and added six more ribs to the 8x6 to create a stronger flange in these HIPS (high impact polystyrene) or ABS (acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) reel designs. This has been proven to enhance both in-process and shipping reel performance for our customers and the demand has been phenomenal."

PittsPlas is, also, taking a leadership position with the environment with the way they've been going to market with these products. Walker went on to explain that they have improved production facilities with additional molding equipment so that they can offer J.I.T. (just in time) deliveries to help better accommodate their customers' scheduling needs. "These new reels are also recyclable", he added, "after their useful life we'll take them back and re-process them. A good analogy would be the classic milk truck delivery - we take back the empties!"

The new Standard Wire Reels are available in a wide range of custom colors with optional customer labeling.

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Copyright 2008 Pittsfield Plastics Engineering Inc., Precision Spools Division

Wire reels  Plastic spools