How Plastic and Injection Molding Reduces Costs

Increase Your Margins

In today’s market, designers and engineers are being pushed to constantly improve products while margins shrink. With the continued drive towards cost reduction, plastic and injection molding provide multiple opportunities to reduce your costs across each segment of the product design, production, and delivery process. 

Significant Savings

Across the life-cycle of a product, a plastic-focused design can potentially save millions of dollars. In today’s uncertain times, especially in the supply chain, minimizing parts and assembly steps will not only save money but also increase on-time delivery to customers. 

When moving parts to production, product designers are faced with a choice: steel or aluminum tooling? Watch the webinar to learn common misconceptions between the two along with a side-by-side comparison that will help you to make more informed decisions. 

Prototyping

Before a product is ready for market, it is essential to optimize the design. The initial design is typically focused on the end-use case. But what seems like a basic design component can have a significant impact on overall costs. Take an L-shape or U-shape piece. From a material perspective, when milled from a single block, the majority of the material would be wasted.

A simple notch or patch might require additional CNC machinist time potentially increasing each part cost by hundreds of dollars. By rapid prototyping, you can optimize your design cutting overall costs by up to 40% and, with Xcentric, you can get your first parts in a matter of days helping you get to market faster.

Production

Injection molding has the potential to lower production costs. Lower labor costs and tooling amortization along with part consolidation, minimizing assembly steps, and eliminating yield loss can achieve significant cost savings.

+ 200 SKUs
+ Demand (part/year/SKU) 200
+ Part Cost: $96
+ Yearly Production Cost: $3,860,000
– Tooling Investment: $0

+ 200 SKUs
+ Demand (part/year/SKU) 200
+ Part Cost: $21
+ Yearly Production Cost: $880,000
+ Tooling Investment: $1,500,000

Logistics

Fulfillment costs continue to grow exponentially while customers expect delivery faster and faster. Plastic materials can provide the same tensile strength as metal while being up to 80% lighter. Additionally, plastic materials are more malleable provide flexibility in packaging lowering packaging and volume shipping costs. 

Beyond simply lowering costs in fulfillment, it minimizes Supply Chain risk. The current pandemic has highlighted vulnerabilities in the Supply Chain. Minimizing parts and additional assembly will minimize the different points necessary in your supply chain. At Xcentric, we’re proud of having all of our production facilities based right here in Michigan.