Nikola: Mastering Plastic Molding Cost Strategies

Leah Archibald: You just presented at aPriori’s Manufacturing Insights Conference, and your breakout session was standing room only. Everyone wanted to hear what you had to say. Why? What’s your secret?  

Rich Morabito: Money, right? Everybody wants to save money. So I did injection molding tooling, which you can save maybe $20 million a year ’cause to tool up a whole interior exterior of a vehicle, it could be 100 million, so it’s a lot of money that goes out fast, a lot of plastic parts on the car fascias, lamps, instrument panels. So I take all the parts on the vehicle, I run them through your software, which is great. It gives me a target, work with purchasing, they try to source it for that. I help negotiate and that’s the fun part. We save money, right? The software pays for itself the first day really. They wanted me to hire a bunch of cost engineers, like 10, and I said, “No, let’s have two cost engineers with the software, that’s all I really need,” so I built in a cost savings right before I started. I got hired the next day so it wasn’t a hard sell. 

Leah Archibald: Wait a minute. The software paid for itself the first day?  

Rich Morabito: Yes. Because we were sourcing a bunch of tools and the quotes were way higher than they should be. So we dug right in, we went to the tool shops, we negotiated, and we got the best cost just using the software, ’cause it gives the line by line line item, right? And go to the tool shop and say, “Guys, here’s what we got, what do you got?” And they were just like, “Oh yeah, we can do it for that or oh yeah, I see now. Yeah, maybe we can lower our price a little bit,” so it’s through negotiating, going through the software, having fun, basically.