Making Client Needs the Priority

Omega Tool Corporation
Written by Ryan Cartner

Omega Tool Corporation is a global leader in the engineering and manufacturing of plastic injection molds operating out of both Canada and Mexico, serving the automotive, home appliance, and commercial goods industries.
~
Since the very beginning, the company has demonstrated a level of quality and expertise that has enabled consistent growth year after year. Today, Omega operates two mold building plants and two validation centers, one each in Canada and Mexico, and employs 280 people across the organization. Omega is undoubtedly the largest supplier of large complex automotive exterior in NA.

The company specializes in the engineering, design and manufacturing of large, complex plastic injection molds for the automotive industry including the following exterior components – fascia and grille assemblies, fenders and doors. The interior components consist of instrument and door panels and centre consoles, among multiple pillars and panels. The non-automotive products consist of home building supplies and appliances, packaging trays and pallets. These represent just a small sample of a vast portfolio of products the company has developed.

With decades of experience developing the most lean and efficient manufacturing processes, and the highest quality products, the company’s true value proposition can be found in its team of highly skilled and experienced engineers and technicians. The experts at Omega Tool Corporation are focused on the quality and timing expectations of their customers. Over many years they have come to understand exactly what their customers’ needs are, and they are committed to delivering on those expectations with first time throughput from the initial stages of determining the feasibility of a project, all the way through to the validation process and the final delivery of the product to the customer.

A perfect example of the company’s capacity to identify the needs of its customers and adapt to meet them can be seen in its overall geographical structure. “We understood that our customers had a need to build plastic injection molds in multiple locations,” says Greg DeFrancisco, Director of Sales and Program Management with Omega. “Many of our customers have plants in both Canada and Mexico; our presence in both regions allows us to build, service and support them.” Omega recognized the value that having facilities in both countries would provide its customers, and in 2015 it opened a plant in Querétaro, Mexico to build that value into its offering. Omega built its first large plastic injection molds at its Mexico plant within six months of opening the facility. “That’s something that has never been done in the history of the industry,” says DeFrancisco.

Omega’s engineering team is capable of tooling design at any level, from simple designs to the most complex plastic tooling on the market today. The company has a vast collection of advanced machining tools capable of building large complex plastic injection molds. The company also offers service and support with repairs and troubleshooting services in order to extend its expertise to molds built by other suppliers.

In order to provide customers with top quality products, Omega Tool Corporation has invested significantly in capital equipment and state of the art modelling software. Omega engineers are experts in the trade and use Unigraphics NX software platform, a sophisticated solid model design system that enables engineers to design and model molds digitally to a very high level of precision before machining them. Once the design is completed to the customer’s exact specifications, it is handed off to the Manufacturing Team where the company has more than 45 pieces of advanced CNC machining and complementary equipment to build the molds from the designs. These tools represent a substantial investment from the company, but Omega understands the value in being able to provide the best possible quality to customers in every aspect of its product design. The Omega Tool facility is a 95,000 square foot building located in Windsor, Ontario with a non-stop 24/7 production schedule to ensure on-time delivery.

Omega Tool Corporation has made efficiency in the manufacturing process a priority. A dedication to lean manufacturing principles has enabled the company to keep costs down, keeping its pricing competitive and turnaround times short. The company’s team of manufacturing technicians understands the needs of the marketplace and is always raising the bar to meet those expectations, with the goal of continuously leading the industry with the best people, the best machines, and the best processes and procedures. “We’re committed to exceeding our customers’ expectations through innovation, great customer service, and unsurpassed quality,” says DeFrancisco.

Program management is another key component to the value that Omega offers to its customers. With almost forty years of experience in injection mold tooling, the company has developed an expertise in understanding the challenges projects can present. The company’s project management team is made up of mold designers and builders who have a singular focus on achieving the best possible result for customers. Omega personnel will come into a project during the earliest phase to help the customer determine its feasibility, they will work closely with the customer throughout the design and engineering phase to make sure the designs properly represent the customer’s conception, and, once the designs are in place, Omega will build the tooling and deliver it on time, to the exact specifications that were set. Even further, Omega stands by its customers and its products long after delivery, for the lifetime of the tool.

These aftermarket services represent the company’s commitment to maintaining longstanding relationships with its customers. Making every effort to eliminate any possible pain points related to a customer’s mold tooling is a cornerstone to Omega’s approach. Being involved from the very beginning of a project and providing a single point of contact makes Omega accessible to the customer at a moment’s notice, and putting the product through a rigid validation process in the end is another important aspect of how Omega works to simplify all the challenges related to mold tooling for its customers.

For validating the quality of an injection mold, Omega uses a large, high performance, GX Series Krauss Maffei injection molding machine. This equipment can hold a mold closed with up to 4000 tonnes of pressure, enabling the company to test all of the molds it builds to very high precision. The validation process ensures quality, and has enabled the company to achieve an ISO 9001:2008 quality control certification, which demonstrates the precision and consistency with which Omega products are built.

Beyond this quality certification, the company has also been recognized by the industry itself. The Professional Engineers of Ontario, Windsor-Essex chapter recognized Omega with an Experimental Development – Improved Product award, which is granted to companies for exceptional technological advancements in their products. Omega was also recognized with an award from the Society of Plastics Engineering, and most recently, with a Supplier of the Year award from the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles company. They honoured sixteen of their North American suppliers, giving Omega Tool Corp. the Foundational Principles award which recognizes companies that honour FCA’s foundational principles.

One way in which Omega has set itself apart from competing companies is in its ability to build global programs. Customers will often need to build the exact same molds in multiple regions; the way Omega is structured, it is able to build one set of molds in Canada for the Canadian market and precisely duplicate those molds in Mexico for the Mexican market. This capacity to design, manage and manufacture in different regions for large programs is unique in the industry. There are very few competing companies with the resources that Omega has developed over the course of its lifetime. The capabilities, the large equipment, crane capacities, and highly skilled engineers and technicians at Omega truly set the company above the rest.

Omega represents a turnkey solution for the plastic injection mold industry, capable of helping and supporting the customer from part development all the way through validation and customer acceptance. “We can meet all of our customers’ needs from within our facilities and with our own people,” says DeFrancisco. “In our industry, customers have expectations that when they receive the molds they’re capable of running them immediately without any concerns. That’s our main focus so that our customers don’t have to spend downtime outside of their production environment when they accept our molds.”

With nearly forty years of experience in the plastic injection mold industry, Omega Tool Corporation’s team of experts understand exactly what customers need.

AUTHOR

CURRENT EDITION

The World in a Grain of Sand

Read Our Current Issue

PAST EDITIONS

Harvesting the Sun

February 2024

Making it Right

December 2023

Grand Innovation on the Infinitesimal Scale

November 2023

More Past Editions

Featured Articles