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One of the best things about UPM is its flexibility in interfacing with customer supplied molds and equipment, integrating them into our existing manufacturing process. As rising fuel and shipping costs have now forced customers to seek partners in key geographical regions, we at UPM have the experienced personnel and equipment to interface almost any molds and secondary operation machinery into a specialized manufacturing program that meets the needs of our customers.

Walter Pipan, UPM’s Facility Manager states, “With our large maintenance crew, we are able to provide all phases of support to the customer as far as automation, electrical, and mechanical interfacing. We also know that we need to respond quickly and assess every job accurately in order to produce little or no downtime. This, along with UPM’s direct ship capability to major distribution centers, UPM provides our customers with a satellite manufacturing operation second to none in the western United States.”

“One of UPM’s strengths is being able to adapt to it’s customer’s needs, our primary job is to sell a service. We don’t just make plastic parts, making a plastic part is the easiest part we do. Providing on-time delivery, logistics, service, quality, inventory control, and maintenance is where the magic happens.  Putting together the supportive framework that synergizes with and facilitates each customer’s unique needs critical for a great program.

We need to react quickly to our customers needs, as well as participate in customer development, wrapping our resources around the customer to take on larger, more logistic intensive projects.”

-Steve Dowling
VP of Manufacturing

Building a manufacturing process can be difficult enough. Between managing all the expenses, working out material selections, patents, tooling, and more, you can quickly find yourself with a headache. When you start to consider the complexity of creating your supply chain and balancing the many variables that go into place, it’s obvious that choosing the right manufacturing partner is critical. We at UPM help our partners avoid having to deal with all those details by designing a program that works at the absolute lowest cost. This not only boosts your margins, but frees your company up to work on activities that allow your company to grow.

We have a large 9 acre facility with 127,000 sq ft of production and warehouse space. Our facility can load and unload both international and domestic containers, as well as store your product in a clean and safe manner whether it is bulk stacked or pallet racked.

Our experienced shipping team works wonders in order pulling, labeling, and consolidation for our clients as well as maintaining a 98% inventory accuracy on our finish goods. Our fleet of trucks transport local cartage and handle outbound and inbound freight for both domestic and international intermodal shipments. We handle everything from pulling the order, consolidating your freight, scheduling the pickup, and producing and managing the necessary shipping documentation needed for inventory control. We take pride in being a very versatile 3PL provider and can provide for any special program needs.

Michael Hartman, UPM’s Logistics Manager, explained it this way, “In a consistently changing global environment, UPM stays flexible and keeps your logistical supply chain flexible and lean. We have the ability to perform container pickup, customer consigned inventory, complex intermodal shipping programs, and much more. Because we are a full service manufacturing company, we are able to greatly lower the rapidly increasing shipping and logistics expenses currently plaguing businesses.”

UPM consistently strives to uphold our reputation as the plastic injection molder who thrives on handling the tough jobs that other molders can’t get right. One part of UPM’s “secret sauce” to achieving high quality is the great experience of our management team. The other part is a carefully nurtured culture which makes top quality a must. Ensuring consistently high quality manufacturing isn’t a job which can be achieved by a great quality control department alone, however. Quality control is a philosophy, and when anyone sets foot inside our facility and goes to work, they immediately become one of our 300+ “inspectors”, all of whom are trained to spot and remove any sub-par quality parts on sight. This creates a production environment with multiple levels of safeguards for inspection, and an ultra-low reject rate.

This commitment to proactive screening and removal of bad parts is further supplemented with a world class Quality Assurance department (QA). The QA department is skilled in identifying key attributes such as visual appearance, weight, load bearing strength, and dimensions, based on requirements given by the customer. By utilizing a methodology that begins with identifying these key product requirements, QA is able to quickly build specialized multi-point testing protocols that ensure the same top quality result between differing batches and even varying materials. As stated by our QA Manager, Pat Brady, “I’ve been in quality assurance 39 years, in a variety of industries from aerospace and medical, all the way to automotive. UPM has very experienced staff, advanced technical knowhow, and enjoys conquering technical challenges. This is why we are known for solving technical challenges that others cannot handle.”

One example of this point in action was with a customer who was producing plastic beer kegs. Their last supplier couldn’t get the process and quality dialed in to a point of reliability. The specific problem they encountered was the plastic warping from its perfectly circular shape into a slightly oval shape. This caused the multiple components to not fit together, effectively ruining each run that was afflicted with this problem. After bringing the program to UPM, however, we quickly spotted the issue, and quality control built a custom set of parameters to prevent another flare up of that defect. Now the program is running with full stability and both UPM and the client couldn’t be happier.

There has always been a great deal of competition in the areas of contract manufacturers and plastic injection molding, from both within the US and worldwide. With all of that competition, you would think that pricing would be the main separator between different injection molders offering similar services. Interesting enough that may not be the case, according to a recent survey. Out of approximately 1,300 professionals who were polled, the main determining factors for choosing a provider were in the following order:

1)   Customer Service
2)   Quality
3)   Pricing

Customer service came in the #1 place, with quality closely trailing in the #2 spot. Below the first two was pricing at #3. Stop and think about it for a second. This type of customer behavior is not new at all. Look many of the current consumer market sweethearts such as Amazon.com, Apple, Google, Southwest Airlines, and Zappos. All of these companies became huge because they always offered customers a better experience than the competition, but not always the lowest prices. It’s not surprising that business customers want the same type of treatment.
It’s common for manufacturers to lose sight of this and pivot towards trying to produce items at the lowest possible price, caving to pressure from 3^rd world overseas manufacturing. This, in many cases, results in a sacrifice of both quality and customer service. We at UPM have always believed in the power of excellent customer service and high quality services delivered at a competitive price, and have built our company around the customer.

UPM’s Customer Service Manager, Sue Farnworth, explained the philosophy this way, “We at UPM are customer service driven, whereas most companies let the manufacturing set the tone of their policies. We truly envision a partnership with our customers in a mutually win-win relationship.”

The modern business environment was proving exceptionally tough for one of our Fortune 500 customers. Like many companies, they were struggling with being squeezed with both sides of the supply chain. They were experiencing increased material and supplier costs, while also being pressured to lower their pricing to large retail customers in order to stay in business. Because of this, their margins were being compressed down to nearly nothing and the management was considering pulling the plug on the product line. This same type of phenomena is pushing companies out of the running every single day, and our unnamed client was about to end a product that had successfully generated income and satisfied customers for nearly a decade. Luckily for everyone, UPM had a chance to offer a different outcome that saved the product line and strengthened our customer’s margins.

At first sight it seemed unfair. They had done everything that you would expect a smart, well established company to do. They found the cheapest plastic injection molding and component manufacturing overseas and set up their supply chain utilizing the lowest cost suppliers that they found. On the logistics end, they arranged for a container unloading service to handle the logistics of unloading and transporting the overseas shipments, and finally their fully assembled and packaged products would be stored in warehouses until they were shipped out to the retail customers.

Unfortunately that supply chain, which was working well in times of a booming economy, couldn’t adapt to the volatile environment of today. The slower overseas manufacturing resulted in a 10 week order lead time forcing them to rely on sales forecasts to predict demand and store the proper amount of inventory. As the economy suddenly slowed, they weren’t able to quickly shut down the manufacturing pipeline, resulting in millions of square feet in over-inventory, strangling their cash flow while also increasing their expenses. This placed them in a very difficult position with little room to maneuver.

This supply chain issue is plaguing a great number of companies and has already taken some of them out of the running. This strictly-outsourcing trend was established years ago, and it provided competitive advantages in a different market environment. But the now rising costs of overseas manufacturing and value added services has made what was once an advantage provided by outsourcing into a disadvantage.

Insourcing is the new outsourcing.

When the supply chain manager from this company approached us at UPM, the outlook seemed bleak. “Management says that this product is going to be pulled within the next 6 months”, the stern-eyed gentleman explained, “They don’t understand that we need this though, because even though the margins are near nothing right now, [this product] is the cornerstone of our company’s offerings”. Having worked with other companies in a similar position, UPM was able to quickly craft an alternative strategy that wouldn’t result in the destruction of their customers’ favorite product.

Upon reviewing the current expenses and costs with our potential customer, we noticed that there was a huge amount of waste and unnecessary expense in their supply chain. We ran the numbers and it became clear that they would save a large amount of money by continuing the manufacture of some of the smaller components overseas, but bringing the larger injection molded plastic components and assembly back into the US.

After brainstorming and constructing a custom plan of action with our customer, we implemented the following five changes together:

1. Bring back the manufacture of larger injection molded plastic parts into the US.
2. Consolidate large injection molding, container unloading, logistics, inventory management, and product assembly.
3. Develop an effective JIT (Just-in-Time) manufacturing program.
4. Leave the smaller parts to be manufactured overseas where they are cheaper and utilize customer consigned warehousing to bring them into the assembly process.
5. Warehousing and freight forwarding costs were eliminated.

This manufacturing program proved highly successful and reduced our customer’s order lead time from 10 weeks down to just 1 week, and eliminated two 1,000,000 sq. ft. warehouses, improving cash flow by 300%. By removing the vast waste caused by the over-dependence on overseas manufacturing and eliminating the large cost of producing and storing inventory ahead of time based on sales forecasts, we achieved lower landed costs then China which brought the product back to the point of being profitable. This has given our customer a distinct competitive advantage, and with more room to maneuver and negotiate with their retail customers, they have increased business 35%.

This is just one recent example of the kind of advantage that we provide our customers through innovative manufacturing and logistical solutions. Even if your company isn’t in dire straits like this company was, chances are that we may be able to significantly lower your costs and increase your competitive advantage too. If you are interested, don’t hesitate to give us a call so we can chat about your unique situation.

Some people might assume that we are simply against overseas manufacturing. What we at UPM are against is inefficiencies and wasted earnings. Over the last 20 years, outsourcing to China or other low cost countries has commonly been viewed as a silver bullet for lowering costs and increasing profits. Now we are in a different market environment where the over saturation of that strategy has in many cases eliminated the benefits for a lot of companies without them even realizing it yet. To get the best manufacturing solution, a company needs to be innovative and create a strategy that allows both overseas and US manufacturing to synergize, driving costs lower than is possible with just one or the other. That’s just one of the many things we do here at UPM.

UPM, one of the Wests largest users of post consumer resins, has  finished developing an alternative eco-friendly product for a major large retailer in the home improvement market segment.

This product was developed from a concept and brought to an early market success.

We at UPM would like to wish everyone a safe and happy holidays!