In response to medical device OEMs' cry for more North American manufacturing capacity, plastic molding and tooling specialist Westfall Technik is significantly boosting its cleanroom capabilities.
Business Wire
Westfall Technik's Chicago building.
The Las Vegas-based firm has just completely refitted a brownfield structure and opened it as a purpose-built, 40,000-sq. ft facility near Chicago featuring three Class 8-certified cleanrooms and one white space certified for meeting Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP).
It further expects the cleanrooms, which can accommodate up to 23 injection molding presses, to gain ISO 13485 certification by this September. The GMP-compliant space, meantime, has the room to take up to 15 molding machines. Press sizes will range from 35 to 400 tons in clamping force.
The site also features a fully functional tool room, with dedicated, climate-controlled mold storage space.
In just the past 18 months, Westfall also tripled its cleanroom space in Riverside, CA; doubled it in Union City, CA.; and installed new cleanrooms in New Richmond, WI and in Tijuana, Mexico.
This all is part of growth spree that has seen the firm acquire or launch some 19 businesses in North America in less than 4 years.
According to the company's chief operating officer, Mark Gomulka, Westfall Technik is operating on the “If we build it, they will come” strategy as it relates to medical molding capacity, because “as soon as we put out one of our footprints, we sell it out immediately.”
Westfall also plans to install three of its M3 micromolding machines in its Chicago plant, and make it a micromolding center of excellence. The M3 is an all-electric, precision micromolding technology that Westfall acquired when it bought Ontario, Canada-based Mold Hotrunner Solutions (MHS) in December 2018. The machine can micromold, without waste, highly engineered materials such as bio-absorbable resins into microscopic-sized parts.
In addition, Westfall is considering shifting production of its NxtBio brand of bioscience laboratory consumables to the new Chicago site. The company in May 2019 acquired Claremont, CA-based NxTBio Technologies, whose product line includes pipette tips, filter tips, tubes and strip tubes, vials, multi-well plates, and related racking systems.
“Ultimately we will be investing millions of dollars in new, all-electric machines for this site,” said Gomulka. Although not committing yet to which types of presses they will buy, he said that Westfall’s preferred electric brands are KraussMaffei, Sumitomo, Netstal and JSW.
Westfall’s portfolio of healthcare-related products includes medical devices, pharmaceutical delivery systems, diagnostic tools, and consumer health products. This includes the molding of plastic parts used in COVID-19 diagnostic rapid testing for both home and clinical use.
The new Chicago plant helps to fill out the company’s regional production capacities: “This is a necessary location for us, right in the Midwest, in the middle of the medical corridor that runs from Chicago up to Wisconsin,” notes Gomulka. In the Midwest, the company already operates facilities doing toolmaking in Willernie, MN; molding in New Richmond, WI; and both tooling and molding in Wakefield, MI, in the state’s Upper Peninsula.