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The Next 10 Years of plastic injection
2017/9/1
Over the next decade, today's manufacturing pressures will only intensify as OEMs demand ever-lower costs, higher quality, and greater productivity. And if these demands don't present enough of a challenge, OEMs will increasingly outsource manufacturing tasks they once handled themselves by requiring molders to take responsibility for product design, development, and assembly. This trend is already well entrenched among Tier 1 automotive suppliers and is now picking up steam in other industries.
1)Take more responsibility
These "product-development companies" will have to select and qualify suppliers, source non-plastics components, manufacture finished assemblies and products, perform quality assurance, and sometimes ship the finished products to the end user.
2) Look to your cells
One way to combat the high cost and complexity of a typical manufacturing cell will again be a reliance on the supplier infrastructure. Ten years from now, molders will turn more often to the machinery supplier as a system integrator responsible for providing a smoothly operating cell.
3)Try something new
Advanced process technologies will increasingly dominate the manufacturing cells of the future as a means to cut costly handling and secondary operations. Multi-material molding in all its variations will be widely used to produce cost-effective components and to support aesthetic and functional design goals.
4)Fewer but bigger
Due to the increased cost involved in producing assembled products, rather than just molded components, the number of injection molding companies will be significantly smaller than it is today. Product design and development, project management, and increased up-front investments for manufacturing cells simply require a level of funding not available to the small molding company.
5)Faster Tools Wanted
Tooling techniques based on rapid prototyping will also be used more extensively and in a larger number of applications as time pressures become more intense. Continued technical advances will likely overcome today's limitations on part size and dimensional tolerances. Similarly, these "rapid" manufacturing techniques will be capable of making anything from a few prototypes to market-introduction quantities to full-scale production volumes.
Available from: http://www.ptonline.com/articles/injection-moldingthe-next-10-years
