At Proterial Cable America High Performance Medical Solutions (PCA-HPMS), the components we make go into live saving medical devices such as endoscopes, injection lines and ultrasound machines, and each customer’s needs are different.
With custom needs in mind, we can extrude custom parts faster, more efficiently and effectively than our competitors thanks to our hard-working and experienced engineering crew, our rapid prototyping research and development lab, and our tooling and machine shop.
When a customer comes to PCA-HPMS with a need, we know that “close enough” simply isn’t “good enough”. Our team can take a customer’s request, develop a prototype and provide it back to the customer for evaluation. If adjustments are needed, we are able to turn a new version around quickly thanks to our on-site tooling shop.
“Customer collaboration is very important,” says Tim Sabrowski, R&D Tooling Engineer at PCA-HPMS. Sabrowski noted that a recent customer brought in a project and decided to drastically change what they were looking for. PCA-HPMS was there with them every step of the way.
Originally the project included a 3-lumen tube, but by the time it was finished it was a 6-lumen tube.
“Through customer testing it evolved,” he says. “With the tooling cell here and with our R&D Lab, we were able to incorporate all of the ideas and changes they had.”
With the ability to make changes in real time, under one roof, our customers can count on faster updates by instant communication and ultimately, a superior product.
Internal tooling reduces costs by removing the need to outsource work and cuts down dramatically on go-to-market timing, as well as on shipping costs. Apple Rubber notes that manufacturers with in-house tooling reduce costs and expenses to their customers with, a fact well recognized by PCA-HPMS.
When we receive a customer request for a custom medical extrusion, we turn to Tim Sabrowski to lead us through the design process for a particular part that will fulfill the customer’s needs.
“A tooling shop is a machine shop, we have very specific equipment, it helps us make the tips and dyes, that’s what it’s mainly focused on,” Sabrowski says.
Sabrowski and our tooling shop team use a variety of pre-made tools from past projects to shape the extrusion according to the customer’s custom request. If we do not already have a specific tool our customer is looking for, no problem – we can make a new one.
“[Having your own machine shop] is a necessity if you want to be viewed as one of the premier extrusion shops. [If you don’t have your own tooling shop] you’re at the mercy of vendors and it can lead to long lead times,” he says.
This isn’t just true for medical extrusion—According to Modern Machine Shop, lead times and costs rise significantly for manufacturers in general without in-house tooling.
Not only do you know you will get a high-quality product at PCA-HPMS, but going to an alternative extrusion shop could end up taking much longer.
Sabrowski says that we avoid the pitfalls of a company that doesn’t have its own tooling shop—namely the long wait times and customer frustration that comes from the revision process.
“You would have to outsource your tooling and when you need to make revisions it’s hard to get it done quickly,” he says. “[Having our own tooling shop] gives us a big advantage because it keeps our lead times down, a lot of machine shops are busy right now, if you go to a shop and you need to get a tool made, you could be looking at 6-8 weeks, where it’s something we could potentially do in 24 hours.”
For us, the process involves creating a prototype based on the specific project and making a sample extrusion which we then bring back to the customer. If that doesn’t work quite right we alter the model and tweak it, based on our recommendations, requests by the customer, or a combination of the two.
We are able to work with our customers for unusual or highly unique designs. The back-and-forth revision process between our engineers and our customer is collaborative, and brings both sides onto the same team, ultimately leaving both sides feeling accomplished—a far cry from the annoyance of a 6-week wait for one alteration.
A major benefit of having the tooling shop in-house in our Ashaway, RI location, is that when a customer is looking for a change, we can get it to them quickly. But if a design is well outside the normal range of requests, we have great partnerships with custom tooling vendors that will continue to bring products back to us quickly and with high precision. Whether internally or through trusted partners, PCA-HPMS delivers solutions as quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively as possible.
When it comes to secondary operations like trimming, cutting, tipping and forming, punching and drilling, or pad printing, we are usually able to accomplish the customer’s needs.
But, in the rare instance that your order needs highly specialized assistance, we can expedite that order as well. If your order requires an outside vendor’s assistance, here is how the process works:
Not only does this help make sure our customers get the part exactly the way they need it, as quickly as possible, but it also contributes a new tool to our shop, available for future projects and enabling us to do even more work completely in-house.
When you start your next project, remember the in-house capabilities we have at PCA-HPMS. Our on-site tooling and machine shop will help you bring your project together faster, more efficiently, cheaper and with the highest quality product possible.
“Having a tooling shop onsite is critical – our process engineers are phenomenal, and they have a lot of great ideas, but it takes tooling, fixtures and more to apply those ideas to the product,” Sabrowski says.
Contact us today so we can get your custom product out the door faster!
