Port Erie offers our customers tremendous Engineering support. We have a staff of degreed plastics engineers, and each customer is assigned a Project Engineer. That project engineer serves as the chief technical liaison, and our customers have come to see this as a tremendous competitive advantage. Our engineers work hard to support our customers in various ways. They help source alternative resins that are more cost effective; they can offer ideas to manufacture more efficiently; they offer advice on new tooling designs or existing tool modification. We even have one engineer who serves primarily as an automation engineer, looking for cost savings through robotics.

Occasionally, we channel all this brain power in one concentrated direction. For example, we were bringing on a new customer with eight molds. The customer was pulling out of a financially troubled molder 100 miles away, and could not afford down time. We showed up at the other molder at 5 p.m. on a Friday to pick up the molds. We ran all the molds through our tool room for an inspection and had an engineer start each job. By 5 p.m. the next day, a Saturday, we had part approval from each mold. We were shipping parts the following Tuesday. These guys didn’t have a social life that weekend, but the customer’s needs were satisfied.

When they’re not working, you‘ll find some of these guys on a golf course, or up a tree with a bow and arrow, playing in a rock band or at a ball game. They’re fun guys to work with. But above all, they know how to get the job done for you.