MEMO

To: Dr. Hugh Jack

From: Matt Remelts

Subject: Royal Plastics Tour

Date: 4-15-97

Our tour of Royal Plastics on Tuesday, April 15, revealed a very versatile company. With a wealth of experience and product scope, they offer an attractive service that will fit our injection molding needs. I believe we must consider them our top contender for the contract. They provide in-house engineering and manufacturing services of accurately injection molded plastic products. Royal Plastics is a somewhat vertically integrated company. They have a hand in the manufacturing process from design to running production and assembly. They do not make their own molds. Their current customers are few but individually large. They currently supply for Prince, Bissell, Gentex, Fridgidaire, and Herman Miller.

Royal Plastics produces strictly injection molded parts. They have no blow molding operations. In the first part of the tour, we were shown their display room. This room had a variety of parts from large chair backs and refrigerator components to smaller and more intricate items such as file handles and other assembled products for car interiors. One display I found particularly interesting was a Herman Miller chair that I had the opportunity to sit in for my last co-op.

After the show room, we were taken across the highway to one of the production facilities. This particular facility was set up in seven bays with a separate bay for assembly. Each bay was fully operational by itself. They each had their own manager, bathrooms, and personnel. Each bay had from 5 to 10 presses running production. The average press was about 120 tons. In the other production facility, the maximum is 500 tons. The production was very efficient. All the molds were designed to shear the runner and sprue from the part upon ejection. As the parts fall into a bin, a robot arm grabs the runner and transports it to a regrind operation where the plastic is used again for injection. All the employees are trained in SPC, at least enough to enter data and interpret its meaning. Also, the whole facility is immaculately clean. Any machine leak is immediately taken care of and fixed instead of allowing it to continue. The assembly bay is used for a few of the products that have multiple parts. Some operations here are sonic welding and hot stamping. The sonic welder, in one case, was used to connect two halves of a coin holder. The hot stamper was used to apply logos and dial indicators onto a Fridgidaire component.

All in all, from these observations, I believe that Royal Plastics should be seriously considered as a potential supplier. They are a company with a wealth of experience and the market to prove it. They supervise all areas of design and manufacture and turn out a quality product as a result.