Precision Plastic Molding for Innovative Telecommunications Manufacturing

New technological innovations promise rapid expansion to a global telecommunications industry already valued at more than $1.6 billion, with some industry analysts projecting growth of more than 60% over the next decade. The key to that expected growth? Greater consumer and business dependence on communications coupled with new technology that allows each optic fiber to carry more data than ever before.

But this same opportunity for swift growth is already posing real challenges for the manufacturers that supply the sector. Parts that are in high demand one day are obsolete the next, while supply chains are subjected to unprecedented disruption. Staying competitive will therefore require quick adaptations, high tolerance manufacturing, and expert engineering. In short, manufacturers need cutting-edge telecom plastic molding.

Here’s how telecom plastic molding can help manufacturers innovate and take advantage of the new opportunities this growing industry presents.

Telecom Plastic Molding Can Help You Adapt Quickly to New Challenges

The safest prediction about the future of the telecom industry is that it will change dramatically in ways that we can’t predict today. New innovations will necessitate new parts, while market volatility will lead to sudden swings in demand. Furthermore, already existing parts, such as fiber optic connectors, will continue to evolve and get smaller as they tend towards greater efficiency.

Telecom manufacturers who want to keep their product portfolios relevant tomorrow must start prioritizing flexibility today. In practice, that means making more of their parts through plastic injection molding.

With injection plastic molding, it’s easy to move swiftly and inexpensively from design to production. And once you’re in the production phase, it’s easy to scale up and down the manufacturing of your new part as market conditions shift. That will leave your company less exposed to fluctuations in demand and more agile in your responses to new opportunities.

Telecom Plastic Molding Delivers Precision and Durability at Low Cost

As the telecom industry evolves to rely on more complex technology, suppliers must evolve with them to deliver high-performing parts.

For instance, many telecom plastic parts must be manufactured at an exceptionally high tolerance. Plastic injection molding isn’t the only method of achieving that necessary level of precision, but it can do so without sacrificing speed or production volume. Better still, these parts can also be made to the industry’s high standards for strength, durability, waterproofing, and rigidity.

Furthermore, plastic injection empowers manufacturers to create these high-quality parts without sacrificing the flexibility required to keep up with innovations to the technology. So whether you simply need a different color or a whole redesign of your part, injection molding can get you exactly what you need without breaking the bank.

Don’t Settle for Just a Good Plastics Manufacturer—Find a Reliable Partner

The right plastic molding manufacturer won’t just deliver high-quality parts on time—it will help you realize your company’s full potential by being a steady and reliable partner.

Because staying ahead of the competition requires significant investment in research and development—which can pose its own financial burden—it’s important to work with a company who joins in the design for manufacturing (DFM) process. An expert in DFM and in telecom plastic molding can help hone and iterate prototypes to solve your tricky problems, which will give you a competitive advantage and help you keep costs down.

But delivering exceptional, industry-leading parts doesn’t just require skilled injection molding manufacturing—it requires supply chain management of the raw materials that go into telecom plastics manufacturing. A good manufacturer will help you manage your risks by taking responsibility for sourcing all the raw materials. That will keep your operations resilient and efficient even in the face of market upheaval.

To discover more about telecom plastic molding and how SigmaPro can help your company achieve—and maintain—a competitive advantage, talk to one of our engineers today.

No injection molding contract manufacturer in business boasts SigmaPro’s mix of technical expertise, collaborative partnership, delivery speed or quality. We pride ourselves on finding solutions to all your manufacturing challenges instead of offering excuses about what we can’t do. So let us help you bring complex plastic products to market faster than other injection molders can.

To discover more about high cavitation injection molding and to talk through the right strategy for your goals, talk to one of SigmaPro’s engineers today.

Sāfen
Medical

Manufacturing: medical tags to label IV lines in hospitals

Problem:

Current tagging system leads to high rate of clinician error Preliminary Sāfen Medical tags led to dangerous occlusion of lines

Solution:

SigmaPro collaborated with Sāfen Medical to design plastic tags that are:
• Easy to decipher
• Easy to attach to lines
• Do not lead to occlusion

Outcome

Sāfen Medical has a quality tag system that is performing well in initial tests and is ready for market months faster than they had initially anticipated would be possible.

SigmaPro participated in months of iterations on design, prioritizing the constant communication and back-and-forth collaborative development needed to address the various needs for the design, including those of Safen, their clients, the care-giver who would use the product, and the patient who would benefit from its final functionality. SigmaPro’s primary challenge–and innovation–was designing a channel that would allow the IV tubes, which vary widely in diameter, to pass through the tag without producing slippage or line occlusion.

Despite these complex requirements, SigmaPro was able to innovate design changes that did not threaten the cost or manufacturability of the parts, while also prioritizing the critical needs of Sāfen and their products.

Medical Equipment Supply

Client

Sāfen Medical is a manufacturer of medical tags designed to improve awareness of each patient’s IV medications. At the time of its engagement with SigmaPro, Sāfen Medical had preliminary designs for an innovative system of line labeling that needed to be prototyped and refined.

Background

The current system of IV labeling in the American hospital system is doing immense harm to patients. More than half of IV medication is administered incorrectly, and more than half of those errors result from poor labeling.

To discover more about high cavitation injection molding and to talk through the right strategy for your goals, talk to one of SigmaPro’s engineers today.

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These errors can be fatal:

of clinicians have said that poor labeling has kept them from responding quickly enough to save a patient in crisis. These slow responses occur because all infusion therapy lines look alike, and no effective IV-line identification system has yet been established.

Sāfen Medical’s new tagging system will solve this problem at low cost and bring better care to patients nationwide.

Problem

Line labeling may seem like a simple problem, but ordinary hospital constraints and conditions have made a solution stubbornly difficult to find. The solution had to be low tech to account for “alarm fatigue:” so many alarms go off in hospitals that people ignore them. It needed to be easy to read at a glance but could not become illegible through frequent use and handling. It also needed to be easy to clean and to withstand the repeated application of hospital disinfectants.

Sāfen’s solution?

A series of plastic tags coded by color and shape to be attached to each IV line. The front of each tag has an image and word corresponding to the risk posed by the contents of the line: red for high risk, for example, and green for low risk.

Each tag also has a symbol and word on its front to communicate the line’s type of contents (“Opioid,” for example) and room on the back for specifics (“fentanyl”). This makes it easy for a clinician, facing an emergency, to tell immediately which line is which instead of trying to sort through a tangle of lines.

Sāfen brought this solution to three different injection molders to figure out how to manufacture these tags. Sāfen had several questions that needed to be worked out:

What material should be used?
How to design the tags so that they attached easily to the line but neither fell off nor occluded the line?
How much pressure should be required to open and close each tag?

SigmaPro’s Solution

Sāfen chose to collaborate with SigmaPro Molding. It wasn’t just that SigmaPro is an experienced, FDA-registered supplier with a proven record of successful manufacturing and excel under strict documentation and process validation conditions. It was that the SigmaPro team was responsive and collaborative from the very start.

Most importantly, SigmaPro brought a yes-we-can spirit to the work. When Sāfen showed suppliers an initial prototype that was not yet fully-functional, only SigmaPro saw how to make it work—and then proved that they could through a series of iterative, collaborative designs.

Many plastic injection molders would have gotten bogged down in the development stage, dragging the client through endless layers of red tape, reviews, and inefficient requirements that do not respect the pressure of the client’s timeline. That process can take months or years and cost the client thousands of dollars, leaving them nothing to show for their extra expense. SigmaPro’s turnaround time for each model, however, was no more than two weeks. That meant Sāfen could iterate and refine its solution in a steady process of improvement.

Sāfen found collaborating with SigmaPro to be so smooth and satisfying that Renae Franz, Chief Commercialization Officer at Sāfen, said the people at SigmaPro felt like part of her own team. “We just had to tell them what we wanted to accomplish and SigmaPro found a way to make it work,” she said. “It was so refreshing to work with a supplier who always wanted to say yes.”

Outcome

SigmaPro successfully manufactured Sāfen’s new tagging system—and did so far faster than initially expected. Ms. Franz estimated that, thanks to SigmaPro, Sāfen was able to bring the product to market six to twelve months sooner than they would have with any other supplier.

The tags SigmaPro is manufacturing are already performing well. In an initial study, clinicians were able to find the correct line twenty seconds faster than they could before—a potentially life-saving difference. In another preliminary study, clinicians were better able to identify and remedy errors in lines labeled with Sāfen tags than with existing tagging systems.

Now, thanks to SigmaPro’s speed and diligent problem-solving, Sāfen is taking the tags to market far sooner than expected. Fortunately, SigmaPro also has manufacturing capacity to dramatically scale up production at short notice as clinicians recognize the transformative power of this life-saving technology.