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Team Effort Yields Big Savings
With the help of: Center for Industrial Research and Service (CIRAS)
About
The Challenge
"Our injection molding partner has had some challenges with the quality of a part they make for us,” said Bruce Beguhn, who
owns the Polk City-based Lakeside Products. “They suggested a design change to improve the quality and reduce scrap and secondary
labor, but we needed to know if it was truly going to be better than what we already have.”
Lakeside turned to the team at CIRAS, part of the MEP National Network™. Beguhn shared the new design with Chris Hill, CIRAS engineering services director. Hill, who has extensive experience in injection molding, made some suggestions on changing the configuration of the design. He then brought in his colleague, John Roberts, CIRAS project manager, who did a Finite Element Analysis (FEA) of the new product to determine how it might behave.
When all those benefits are considered, we ended up reducing the cost of the product by 25% in spite of an increased cost in
the raw material. We couldn’t ask for better results than that.