Looking at the financial landscape of the Medical Device Industry, it seems that every day more and more destructive forces enter the scene, and companies are experiencing an ever increasing negative pressure on their profit margins.
Leading commodity brokers are predicting a significant rise in raw material costs for the plastic manufacturers, and the same is true for high grade steel supplies. On top of all this is the expected additional 2.0 plus percent tax on all Medical Device Companies with the roll out of the new Health Care plan. When you are looking at an industry with annual sales $215 billion dollars plus, this additional tax will remove from available resources over $2 billion dollars a year.
In the last few years, Medical Device companies have spent significant amounts to upgrade their facilities with the very latest high tech equipment, improving productivity and also reducing raw material and labor costs as much as possible. Every attempt has been made to trim all possible areas, including the adaptation of new cloud based communication and storage technology.
Yet even with all this effort, profit margins continue to shrink and Medical Device Companies are finding less and less options available to them.
SPE-Sarasota Precision Engineering and its SPE-Medical Division which is focused on the Thermoplastic and LSR Liquid Silicon Rubber Injection Mold segment of the Medical Device Industry recognized this challenging economic trend, and instituted an extensive research project, trying to find some possible options.
Drawing upon 30 plus years of high precision Injection Mold tooling and production, and with the collaboration of the Design, Engineering, Tooling, and Production departments, the research resulted in the development of a new process called the APEM System, Advanced Precision Engineered Molds.
Made up of four basic parts, the APEM System is designed to significantly increase the quantity of parts produced per Thermoplastic or LSR injection cycle. This in turn leads to a reduction in labor cost. In addition to producing higher quantities per cycle, new design processes have elevated the level of precision at the tooling stage, opening up the option to use more robotics at the production stage, reducing labor cost, and also decreasing raw material waste. By successfully combining these components into one single system, the APEM System gives the Medical Injection Mold industry a totally new tool to fight the economic challenges. The APEM System is a perfect fit on the LSR (Liquid Silicone Rubber Injection Mold) side of the business as well as the Thermoplastic end of the industry.
The APEM System is a real breakthrough, in that it successfully combines Advanced Technology with Intellectual Resources, to create a single Solution. Through the use of the APEM System companies like SPE-Medical Division, can offer the customer a better product, and at the same time offset the increase in raw material or labor cost, keeping the needed profit margins in a difficult economy.
With the global economic challenges facing the Medical Device Companies today and in the coming years, a system that offers the option to reduce labor cost, or reduce raw material waste, is a huge step in the right direction.
For more information about this subject visit http://www.spe-inc.com
