The Challenge

While much of the world ground to a halt with the onset of COVID-19, the manufacturing sector stepped up — and that included Industrial Molds.

When the manufacturing of COVID-19 testing kits suddenly became a high priority, one of our customers came to us with a need for molds for their kits. However, with time being of the essence, it quickly became clear that the quantity of molds they needed was beyond one tool shop’s production capacity on such a short turnaround. This project necessitated collaboration, and Industrial Molds worked with other tool shops to get the job done.

Our team played a critical role in the design and production of two 16+16 multi-shot molds and four 8+8 multi-shot molds for our customer’s testing kits. This project became our number one priority, and it paid off. We cut down our normal production time by six weeks and completed the project in 10 weeks, despite being in the midst of a pandemic.

The Engineering

For this time-sensitive project, our engineers worked on two different mold designs with multiple tool shops, which presented a challenge when it came to consensus on designs and construction methods across all the shops. Our goal was not only to have designs that would work, but to also develop designs that could be uniformly manufactured across multiple shops, in record time. The efforts of everyone involved proved to be a success, and the molds were approved.

The Manufacturing

Our manufacturing team collaborated with our engineering team during the design phase, and the result was a safe, comprehensive manufacturing plan ready simultaneous to the design approval. But this was no ordinary manufacturing plan; we had to rethink some of our processes to improve throughput. Rotating working hours became critical to ensure proper social distancing and increased processing. Despite these challenges, our team did an amazing job of getting everything made quickly and to spec, which resulted in the seamless final assembly of each mold.

Summary

When our customer (and the world) needed us to do the seemingly impossible, we used creative problem-solving and collaboration to get the job done. Despite the numerous stakeholders involved at every phase of this process, our shared goal allowed us to pull together and create a solution that was not only effective, but fast.