The nineties roundtable: processors talk to materials and machinery suppliers about their future roles.

The Nineties Roundtable

Round One:

Processors &

Materials Suppliers

In the first of two days of roundtable discussions in Chicago, we asked a panel of processors and resin suppliers what will be the key issues of the 1990's, and the big one that immediately jumped up was education. Strategic partnerships, materials and process innovation, the need for better materials data, and the rise of the full-service processor were other dominant themes.

THE TRAINING GAP

Humbert (Automatic): I think we tend to get lost in the word technology and forget about the basics. Education is one area e all agree on--there's a huge void there.

Poellet (K & M): I agree with Jim that education of people is the biggest problem these days. We have a tremendous problem getting people to perform simple mathematical functions on the line, just adding up the pieces produced in that day. The material suppliers and equipment manufacturers have great engineering and development staffs, but until the processors and the schools are willing to develop educational programs to teach people the basics, we're all in a lot of trouble.

PLASTICS TECHNOLOGY: What kind of training are we talking about? Technicians? Engineers?

Humbert (Automatic): Everything down to basic machine operators.

Jones (Franklin): I think there is a large role in this that our industry has to play: We have to be a lot more in touch with secondary schools and community colleges, we have to play a role in structuring their programs, and we have to be out there selling that this industry has a need for people and it's an interesting, rewarding area in which to work. Right here in Chicago, a great number of corporations have taken over partnership programs in local high schools and they are doing an outstanding job of upgrading the awareness of kids today about what kind of job are out there and the skills they will need to do those jobs.

Pufahl (Metro): I think industry has played a major part in driving down the education system. If you look at most of our operations, we're asking so few of these people to do any thinking. If Dad goes to work and opens and closes a machine gate and comes home, his kid is going to get the idea that there isn't going to be a chance to use anything he learns. Now, we have a real need for people to start thinking in the development of the new technologies. If you aren't using 100% of your human resources in your operation, you're going to have difficulty being competitive over the next 10 years.

PLASTICS TECHNOLOGY: Where is this training going to come from? Who's going to provide it? The material suppliers? Machinery suppliers? Processors' own in-plant programs?

Avery (GE): The Berkshire County Plastics Association, the moldmakers and small molders there, they are establishing with Massachusetts state funds a small educational training program to accomplish some of this. They are coming along reasonably well in putting it together. They're trying to do it on a regional basis.

PLASTICS TECHNOLOGY: What about your company--GE itself?

Avery (GE): The Share The Knowledge program is one portion of what GE does educationally. It's basic polymer education. We recognize that a lot of people out there don't understand a lot of basic things about the materials they're working with, so we're going back to start with what are polymers, what's the difference between a crystal-line material and an amorphous material, how does that affect the properties, and so on. Right now, we have five or six modules together, and our target is to have 12 or 13. We go out to a molding plant, or we bring them into Pittsfield. We give training programs several times a year on design, materials, processing. It's a big part of what we do.

Humbert (Automatic): The only way this thing is going to get off dead center is like our company is doing: we have a long-term game plan to do it ourselves. We have to design a quality training program for ourselves. We're working with Purdue and Notre Dame and we hope to get the type of individuals we want to work for us after graduation. Unless you do it yourself, it's not going to happen, because the state isn't going to do it.

PLASTICS TECHNOLOGY: Do the other processors here agree that you're going to have to do it yourself?

Several voices: Yes.

BETTER MATERIALS DATA

Loeser (Greif): We are going to have to find ways to get smarter regarding raw-material data. I sit here and I am overwhelmed at the number of products that already exist, and they're probably being developed at some rate of 400 or 500 to 600 new products a year, whether they be blends or whatever.

Rothschild (Fremont): There needs to be a more universal way to understand how to select materials for given applications. Within the last year or two, some of the European manufacturers have talked about a common database for material products. I'd like to know what this group's thoughts are on something like that . . . because we get an inquiry from an OEM, and we look at the required properties and decide what material fits them. We'll get the data sheet, but they're not that helpful. We don't make our parts by annealing them to get the highest properties, for example. We try to get them out of the press as quick as we can. So we need property data that relate to how the materials are going to be processed. We need data that when we get it out of a databank, we can compare one material to another. To what degree are we going to move to a unified way of looking at materials?

Theberge (ICI): The Europeans are certainly doing that. ICI is going to join CAMPUS.

Jones (Franklin): Dow has already joined CAMPUS. I brought the CAMPUS system over here when I was with BASF because I thought this was a need. Unfortunately, we weren't able to attract any other materials suppliers to join us. That's got to change. As more people demand comparable information of this nature, the other enginering plastic suppliers in the U.S. are going to join up.

PLASTICS TECHNOLOGY: I'm not sure everyone here knows about CAMPUS: It stands for Computer Aided Material Preselection by Uniform Standards. It started with BASF, Bayer, Hoechst and Huls in Germany agreeing to test their materials the same way, prepare the samples the same way, and test them the same way, so that all the numbers will be truly comparable for the first time. The question is, how long is it going to take before the U.S. producers are using a consistent method of specifying common physical properties? One year? Five years?

Jones (Franklin): More than five years.

Theberge (ICI): Ten.

Hartt (GenCorp): We as molders need uniform testing absolutely. We can't even take the same set of data to GM and Ford. We have to do separate tests. Even GM has its own internal conflicts.

Loeser (Greif): We as a processor need uniform information about how one polymer processes vs. another. I'm not talking about a data sheet that says for blow molding the ideal temperature is 360 to 450 degrees. We know that you need to run a relatively cool temperature to have melt strength and so forth. The data-sheet example I just gave recommended operating conditions over a 100-degree range, but in practice I can't stand more than 10-degree variation. I blow mold large parts that weigh 10 to 50 lb, and bottle data doesn't really cut it for me.

Humber (Automatic): We're looking for a narrowly defined viscosity window, so we don't have such a wide variation of the processibility of materials. We need repeatability.

Pufahl (Metro): It looks to me like right now we're at a stage where we have got equipment that has tigher control than some of the materials we're currently receiving. Until the last five years, our equipment was imposing more variability on the process than the material, so it wasn't necessarily as critical as it is now. Now as we increase our technology, the equipment becomes more sophisticated. It used to be if we varied 50 psi on our backpressure it didn't matter; it's now down to [+ or -] 10 or 2.5 psi, so now materials variability does make a major difference in the processing.

Theberge (ICI): I think what they're referring to is molecular-weight distribution, average molecular weight, that sort of thing. If one comes up with a specification of that type, resin manufacturers are afraid of it because it's hard to make material that consistently. I think we must enter into joint development projects with processors for specific applications.

THE FUTURE IS PARTNERING

Jones (Franklin): I'll have to agree with you John, I think that the partnership aspect is the critical factor. Because when we're talking about delivering a 10-degree processing window, that becomes so machine-specific and so application-specific that it's virtually tailored to that individual piece of equipment and that particular application. That can only be done in a one-on-one kind of partnership, and it costs money. That means we have to be willing to deal in a range of pricing that covers the cost.

Barber (Phillips): On that cost issue--if you can reduce the amount of scrap you guys have to handle, maybe you can afford to pay a bit more for a tighter material spec. Both people can benefit.

Purdy (Freeman): If you take a page out of the Japanese book--why are they successful? It isn't because the materials guys are pouring bucks at problems. It isn't because the machinery guys are off developing new high-speed presses. It isn't because a processor or fabricator has got an edge in the market. They put these things together. They sit down at a table like we are here and they hash the thing out and come up with a plan on how to solve the problem together. Quite frankly, I don't think one leg of the table is going to stand without the other. It's going to take joint ventures which involve everybody.

Hartt (GenCorp): One of the properties we've looked at in thermoset molding is hot strength, the strength of the material as it leaves the mold. We have a lot of parts cracking as they leave the tool, which may account for half our scrap rate. There is not a good test out there that tells me how to measure the quality of incoming resin that will relate to the hot strength of the material as it is processed. We have talked to all our suppliers, and they don't have an answer. They don't know how to measure it.

Ahlgren (Mobay): I think that gets back to the point about technical partnerships. Raw materials suppliers are implementing more and more SPC control, but if we don't know what variables are having an impact on your process, what good is it? There has to be a lot of feedback from the processors to the materials suppliers to correlate what's changing in their products with what's happening in your processing. If you don't share the information and the experiences, it probably never will get solved.

Purdy (Freeman): That's right, You need to dedicate time and production equipment to do those kinds of things, because it's one thing to run some tests on a lab press and an entirely different thing to go out and run some of these very large production presses. So you processors need to be willing to dedictae actual production equipment to solve the problem. When we talk about joint development efforts, we're talking about dedicating resources and equipment and people

Barber (Phillips): A problem that I have seen is that because of the pricing structure, resin companies have been somewhat reluctant to put capital investment in their technical centers until within the last two or three years. Now, I think we see a lot more growth in the technical centers at materials suppliers. For example, processors are putting in bigger blow molding machines, so materials suppliers are going to have to have the current state-of-the-art equipment in their own technical centers so that they can really characterize how their products are going to behave.

PROCESS INNOVATION

PLASTICS TECHNOLOGY: Are the developments of the next decade going to be more in materials uniformity, better processability, or just materials with better properties?

Theberge (ICI): I think process know-how is going to be the key to the '90s without a doubt. New processes, too. For example, engineering blow molding, thermoplastic pultrusion, hollow gas-injection molding, fusible-core injection. I think there's a whole pile of things that are coming down the road, and the future is in learning how to use them effectively.

Ahlgren (Mobay): Structural RIM, SRIM, falls into that category. And we are taking the thermoplastic mold-flow programs and trying to adapt them to RIM.

Avery (GE): Let me tell you where we are coming from right now. It's changed within the last year, year-and-a-half. We have started to put an emphasis on processibility of any new material. As polymers get higher in performance, they tend to become more difficult to process. We're putting a lot more effort on processibility, I don't know if it's 50/50 yet, but certainly it's running towards that direction. Now we try to better understand how to work with that material before we take it out in the marketplace.

Theberge (ICI): If you look at R&D on material performance vs. processing, it's at least 50/50, and it's probably more heavily toward processing.

Jones (Franklin): Definitely more in the composite area. Here I say it's more like 80/20.

Bozelli (Dow): I think Dow's history is that we have put more emphasis on the processor, although recently I'd have to say that has come around 180 degrees. Now, as a basic approach, we want to get started on the early end of new projects. We identify four components to applications development--materials, processing, piece-part design, and tool design and construction--each one is equally important. So now we're paying more emphasis on getting at the design engineers.

EXPANDING CUSTOM ROLE

Humbert (Automatice): In 10 years, we won't be considered just molders. We're going to be people that are involved with all the value-added in a project. We are going to be the people that you materials guys will have to be working with, simply because we're going to be the guys designing the product.

Pufahl (Metro): As we look at the major OEMs that we deal with as they focus their talents, do more outsourcing of manufacturing, by the same token, I see a movement by them, as we demonstrate the capability on the outside to handle the design and engineering aspect, then they'll give more and more of that engineering aspect to our organization.

Rothschild (Fremont): What distinguishes us from any other custom blow molder is that we look at every customerhs product and ask ourselves how can we make it better, less costly. We don't wait, we go to them and say if you change this or that, you can take 30% out of your part. And I see it happening not only in engineering design but product design. We currently supply the console for one car model, which is due for a complete facelift in '92. Well, we didn't wait to get called. On our own we went and designed a '90s console concept with sketches, and we took it into the design center and we got awarded that business. They reworked it, it ended up being their design, but at least we piqued their imagination and slanted it towards blow molding as opposed to injection molding.

PLASTICS TECHNOLOGY: Do you see that as becoming more and more common for custom molders to do that kind of thing?

Theberge (ICI): For the ones who will grow and succeed, yes, they must.

Rothschild (Fremont): I think there's always going to be room for the shoot-and-ship. There's always that segment of the market. But as we see this trend towards gray- and black-box projects, the burden of materials selection is going to fall more on integrated processors. Maybe that is a message for the chemical companies--that they need to put their thrust, as OEM's outsource, to call more on integrated processors with their databases and material properties and projects.

PLASTICS TECHNOLOGY: Another thing that has been mentioned is the possibility that the successful custom processor of the future will have to be a multiprocess kind of vendor skilled in different manufacturing disciplines.

Jones (Franklin): But can you be good in all of them? I think there are some limitations there.

Hartt (GenCorp): I think it's very important for the technologies to be compatible. We already have RTM, and we have ordered a machine to make structural RIM. We feel those two are very related, quite similar in technology, and they complement SMC. For that matter, at the right time we will also compression mold thermoplastics.

Theberge (ICI): I think the real cutting edge for the '90s is going to be the ability to take two or three processes and put them together. I think GE is on the right track with the Alpha I machine, that's the way to go--hybrid processing.

Markham (Battelle): We've tried to follow whaths happening in plastics and keep looking for where is something revolutionary going to happen. Everything we're seeing in processing is absolutely an evolutionary process. The closest thing to revolutionary is those hybrid processes that you're talking about and we see that as a direction that's going to be developing considerably. I know GE and Du Pont are working in that direction, but who else?

Theberge (ICI): ICI is. Big resin companies are all doing it. The top 10 or 12 probably. All the German companies, I'm sure, are doing it.

Bozelli (Dow): This is the way I think it ought to be looked at: If you're going to make a part, the question is, What's the best process to make that? So you need a staff knowledgeable in blow molding, injection molding, extrusion, composites, and whatever. Because if you don't, in this international, fast-response, competitive market that we are emerging into, someone else will come out with a cheaper way of making it.

Round Two: Processors & Equipment Suppliers

On the second day of discussions, we started by asking machinery companies to imagine looking backward from the vantage point of 1999 at the key equipment-related developments of the preceding decade. Naturally, speakers focused first on "high-tech" innovations:

Reber (Milacron): I feel that you are going to find new processes and hybrid processes that we do not know today. We'll look back through the '90s and see where we're mixing different processing techniques and materials in areas like automotive to get body panels and structural parts. You will find that the electronics capability of the machines and supporting systems will have advanced, by the end of the '90's, to the point that processing speed and memory capability will no longer even be a question. So you'll be able to do things with communications in a plant that we're just dreaming about now.

Yahr (Sano): With the newer materials and composites in extrusion, we will see an increase use of twin-screw extruders in sheet lines, film lines, to handle the materials that are more difficult to process.

Rainville (UnaDyn): We will be looking back and seeing that productivity and quality have made the greatest leaps, quantum leaps. Quick mold and material changes will be everyday occurrences. We are currently installing plants with satellite links; in the future, material suppliers will be tied into molding machines from their tech centers, and of course the customers will be placing orders and paying invoices directly over computers, and we will truly become a paperless society.

Hunkar: The most fundamental evolution that has taken place is an increase in the knowledge base in the past decade. I believe we are going to see an evolution that increases that knowledge base even further. Industry in the beginning of the 1990's has recognized the need for Automated Data Acquisition. But that's only one part of a three-part story. Companies interested in addressing quality are now becoming very serious about Process Management. The focus is around SPC, which will become an automatic process control of the future. The future third part of this information evolution will be Event Management in the manufacturing plant, which addresses the organizational aspects and dynamics of the plant.

At the beginning of 1990's American molders are screaming when they have to make a $5000 investment in a better PC, like a PS/2. I forecast that by the end of '90s that they will not bat an eye at paying a quarter of a million dollars for a system that looks at their entire plant.

Faillace (D-S): Although the price of electronics has dropped tremendously, in the next 10 years we will spend more of our capital equipment dollar on controls. We tended in the '80s to think of machinery as separate from the electronics, intelligence and information. I think the latter will become more transparent. In the '90s we won't be talking about bits and bytes, CPU's and I/O's--these will be a given, will be transparent, will be an integral part of the process, like a thrust bearing on a piece of machinery. I don't think we'll be that conscious of it. What we will be conscious of will be enhanced operator interfaces, devices that will make available more information about the process. Some type of graphic displays where the operator sees the entire process in front of him.

A missing piece of the process, a very important piece, that we also treated separately in the '80s, was the polymer itself. If you start with a polymer and you design a machine around it there will be more of a two way street on that issue. I think the polymer and machine, controls system all will be developed with these partnership arrangements--we'll be working more closely together, sharing more information.

A great advance has been taking place in sensor technology. The sensor gap that we had in the '80s will no longer exist to that extent in the '90s. By that I mean, we really did not measure in the '80s the kind of things that were important to the process. We inferred a lot of those measurements--melt temperature and pressures and speeds, or individual layer thicknessess in coextrusions. I think we'll have sensor technology that will more directly measure the parameters that we are interested in--quality, throughput--in terms that the user will readily understand and not have to interpret.

Slawska (APV): New developments are going to be very expensive. I remember the days in blow molding when a mold was $10,000. That was an expensive mold. Now it's $90,000 and very intricate. Because processors are going to have to make long-term commitments, I think they're going to back off and become cautious.

Caren(UniSys): I see one of the things we have to address is getting the design-to-production cycle shortened as much as possible. There are much more complex parts being designed now. It has taken 10 years, actually 15 years, to get injection mold filling analysis to where it is today. I'd say that's fairly mature right now. There are some minor enhancements goint on. Some of the mold-analysis software that we have now for injection molding is being expanded to cover some of other processes. I see that developing over the next decade, I do not know if we will be there by the end of the century.

PLASTICS TECHNOLOGY: In 10 years will we have flow and cooling software for other processes--RIM, for example, blow molding, extrusion through complex dies--at the same state of development as injection molding today?

Caren: If we leave it to the universities, no. If the industry takes an interest and puts together a group of people--the equipment suppliers and the processors and some computer people, who still have to write the programs--then we can do it and make it useful.

Reber (Milacron): A triangular relationship with a material supplier, an end user, and machinery supplier are the ones that have worked best for us. You need those three elements. Beverage bottles are an example of one that was successful. We had a joint program with RIM, that was successful. We also had a kind of partnership on scrapless forming, SFP.

TRAINING

Bessemer (Conair): I think there are a lot of issues, but the single thing that most has to be accomplished is addressing the training issues for people. We as an industry have to start requiring that there are certain levels or standards in regard to machine operations and safety practices no matter what the machine is. Some coordinated industry training for operators and plant managers.

Rainville (UnaDyn): SPI is forming a counsel on training to include molders, machinery manufacturers and materials people, and I am hoping that they will come out with quidelines and models for how often people should be trained and what training programs should contain.

Nissel (Welex): This question of educating people better I think is the wrong approach. We have to accept the fact the people are going to be less educated and are going to have to build the machines to be operated by those less educated people. We are going far too much overboard in many cases trying to build very complex control systems, and the poor guy on the floor who's supposed fto operate the process does not know what to do with it. The approach has to be to simplify these controls to the point where a machine is totally self-operating.

We have machines in 75 countries in the world today, and we do not want to have a big service organization all over the world, so in self-defense we have to build processes that enable us to put very complex machinery overseas, to train people in very short order to run it and deep it running. I think everybody's going to have to get there. I think easy-to-operate, simple-interface control systems to run these machines, because the processes are going to get bigger and more complex. We have telephone modem tie-ins to the machines, if necessary, so we can troubleshoot them back home without having to send a person in the field to do that.

Hunkar: Every machine supplier is putting out a higher and higher technology piece of equipment with more and more computer displays. The poor fellow who has been trained and retrained by four or five machine suppliers really gets confused. The industry is beginning to move toward standardization. The first step is the recently passed SPI communication protocol. A processor will be able to look at his auxiliary equipment with a uniform display at all times. The newly formed Machinery Component Manufacturing Div. of SPI is now addressing other standardization issues that will get around the training program in time and I believe that by the end of the '90s we're going to see a major effect. We're also attempting to standardize displays, so that every machine has an identical kind of display that everyone can understand. And, we're hoping to also standardize a way of machine setups. We're going to provide the processor with a uniform means of communicating with that piece of equipment, and I think at that point our training problems will diminish greatly.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

PLASTICS TECHNOLOGY: Do you think expert systems to help in problem solving will be commonly built into machine controls in 10 years?

Reber (Milacron): It's beyond that. I think you'll going to see things like neural networks and ability for a machine to actually learn the process. Whether that will be here by the end of the century, I don't know, but that's the kind of thing being developed and I think that's the kind of thing you'll see toward the late '90s. Actually have a model of the mold and the machine in the machine control and have it take appropriate action based on feedback through the mold.

Faillace (D-S): I think you're absolutely right. In 10 years, I think we will have more process diagnostics as opposed to machine diagnostics. I think we'll have true intelligence. The machine itself will present you with things that are going wrong with your process--diagnose screw wear or a resin problem--based on a given set of conditions. I don't think you're even going to need the modem to call a supplier. Naybe on-line viscosity measurement will be commonplace. Windows into the process that we do not presently have.

Thompson (Kamco): We have an expert system for our operators on the shop floor; it's the PETS (Plastics Education and Troubleshooting System) program from GE, a computerized problem-solving, troubleshooting aid that tells us how to solve problems like splay with their resins.

Reber (Milacron): We're working on puttng that kind of capability where an operator can actually look to the control display for answers to the the splay problem or something like that. He can ask for that screen and it will show him some steps he can take. We see that kind of capability being built right into the controls.

The other thing is that as we understand better the mold flow and the machine parameters, I think we're going to get closer and closer to the point that you can measure variables on the machine to determine whether you have a good part or not without measuring final part properties. If those properties are within the proper limit, you can assume you have a good part.

ENERGY EFFICIENCY?

Reber (Milacron): Well, I certainly feel that energy is going to become a major factor. We're looking at more energy efficient processes, such as hybrid systems where we use variable-speed electric motors to drive a hydraulic pump in place of a variable-speed pump or a variable-volume pump.

Wood (RP/C): The compression molding industry I think generally running behind injection. You wouldn't believe this, but the first-ever accumulator-equipped compression press we sold was only a little over a year ago. But the important thing is almost every press we've sold since that time has been with accumulators. We even offer a 25% price discount, and we'll take the customer's energy savings for five years to pay for it. We've actually used that.

Thompson (Kamco): Cincinnati Milacron publishes in their book that their all-electric servo-driven press can give up to 75% reduction in your electric costs as opposed to the hydraulic press. We're certainly seeing at least 50-60% savings with that machine. I think that's going to have a major impact. I can imagine that hydraulics could become a thing of the past.

Faillace (D-S): In an extrusion process, there are often many drives and motors involved. In the past we've used primarily variable speed d-c motors. What you see now happening is the a-c variable-speed coming on and having a major impact on energy efficiency. It also helps improve power factor a great deal if you happen to run a motor at less than its full speed.

CRISIS FOR SUPPLIERS?

Rainville (UnaDyn): We are going to have a real quality crisis in the machinery business in general. We are already seeing it. It's not unusual in a mature market like we're in now. We have to concentrate more on quality than price, which will eventually happen.

We see most companies coming out with new models almost every year, which is what is forcing a lot of people out of the injection molding business. It takes a lot of overhead to develop new models and new technology. By the end of the '90's there will be fewer models coming out and there will be fewer people in the machinery business. You cannot keep continually making changes to stay ahead of the competition at the rate thas is going on now in all of the machinery business. We see a lot of turmoil in that business, and people dropping out.

To compete with the Europeans and the Japanese, suppliers have to change their definition of quality to include starting up machines without a hassle. We're changing the whole way we look at things now in terms of reliability. If the machine gets to the customer and it doesn't start, it's our fault. And this attitude is going to save us a fortune. We're paying all those servicemen to fly all over the country. I sell a $5000 machine, and then I have to spend $500 on a serviceman's plane ticket.

Faillace (D-S): Because of the demand for specialty machinery, more sophisticated, better quality, there are going to be fewer and fewer suppliers that will be able to meet those requirements. On a global basis, I think it's going to be a weeding-out, consolidation process. And part of that is redefining what the term shipment is. You know, as machinery suppliers in the U.S., shipment means we've loaded it on somebody's truck and it's on its way. I think some of the Europeans don't count it that way. I think a shipment means you're running at our plant and I think more and more contracts in 1999 are going to be written that way. Customers are going to say, I'm tired of having to wait a month after you claim to have shipped it to get it working and make use of my investment. I think the '90s will see a way of doing business that would mean when that machine is accepted in production, then you bill us. Europeans tend to do it.

We've actually had customers say to us, "You will demonstrate that you can run the product in your plant before we will accept delivery of machine. Some of our customers are doing that now. More will, I believe, require that in the future.

I might interject that customers in the States, of course, want the machine as soon as possible. He wants anything that he can get his hands on. That's counterproductive really because it doesn't give us a chance to test it all properly. But he's willing to put the pressure on us to deliver. The processor has to change his mentality about being willing to accept perhaps a little bit longer lead times on the equipment. It's in his interest.