Working Hard For My Money

Let me first start of by telling you a little bit about the company I work for.  I work for a manufacturing company, Matrix Manufacturing Co., we are a plastic thermoformer.  We have a proprietary line of products which include small cargo trailers to tow behind motorcycles and small vehicles along with a line of trailer accessories for snowmobile trailers and landscaper trailers (we obviously design our own website too...).

Matrix is also a custom job shop, so any company can call us and we can make any part for them, as long as it's a vacuum formed part.


Let me explain briefly what Plastic thermoforming is (aka vacuum forming).  Not to be confused with injection molding, plastic thermoforming is a process where we take a flat sheet of plastic, clamp it into a frame and it goes into a huge oven on our machine.  Different parts have different requirements, so it can be in the oven for 60 seconds up to several minutes (depending on the size of the sheet and thickness of the material).  Once it comes out it gets paired with a mold that has tons of tiny little holes in it and the vacuum begins to run, sucking the plastic to the mold and forming a part.  It then cools for the required amount of time, comes off the mold and out of the machine, where our machine operators take it out of the clamp frame and route it, drill it, cut it, etc. depending on the specifications of the part being made.  It is then stacked on a pallet and shipped out to our customer.  


Without getting too far into detail and completely losing you here... I digress.


Over the last couple months we have been extremely busy with a custom project.  We were contacted by an advertising agency, who was working with a health care company, who in turn is placing this product in one of those very well known discount department stores (think the competition of Target), asking us if we could make a kiosk for them. We generally don't do assembly as a whole... we run the parts and, as mentioned above, route, drill, etc. ... but not actually assemble; that is what this company needed us to do.  Matrix generally runs one shift and we generally have about 11 employees.  For this project we were, at one point, running 3 shifts (which means 24 hours a day people were working this), and had up to 20 employees.  It was a crazy mess of chaos around the entire building.  We were making upward of 900 Kiosks for this company (Hundreds of Thousands of dollars in invoices for these things)!!  In all, we formed around 22 pieces out of plastic for one kiosk, then assembled each piece together, then assembled the kiosk in whole, which included adding the customer supplied parts and boxing it for shipping.  We hand loaded each kiosk into a truck to be taken to a different warehouse and stored until they were ready to be delivered to those discount department stores.  


We've never really had critical deadlines at my job... generally speaking we make a couple hundred parts for any of our customers and have a day or two give with a due date.  This project had to be done and all of those kiosks had to be out our door by Monday, October 27th, 2008.  We met the deadline!  


Here is a picture of the finished kiosk in the store ready to be used: 

The chairs were provided along with the signs, brochures, and a few other little parts.  It's a pretty neat little thing; the top and the front of the Kiosk open up to store the signs and chairs, the table you see folds down so it is flush with the side.  When all is said and done this Kiosk is completely portable as one little box!

Things are finally getting back to normal around work.  We just ended our 3rd shift (which was 10p-7a), we're back down to a manageable number of employees, and we've made all the Kiosks we have to make... for now.  There is rumored to be another order in the making, hopefully the deadline won't be as crucial, and we are in the process of quoting another kiosk type project for them.  So, for a small company in an economic crisis, we are extremely busy!

It's nice to have the job security, but those crazy times make it hard.

Anyhow - a small glimpse into what my company does, I work in the office; my job is to do whatever it takes to get the machine operators everything they need to do their job, along with some other things like AP, AR, Payroll, etc.  This project was one of those things that you can't wait for it to be over, but it's so huge for our company that you also want to remember it.  I'm posting this blog not only to give those reading some background on what I do, but so that I can remember it for years to come.