Reduce Mold Tooling Lead Time with Automation: How Molders Can Speed Up Production and Win More Business
The injection molding industry faces increasing pressure to deliver parts faster and more affordably while expanding capacity despite ongoing labor shortages. Finding experienced toolmakers is increasingly difficult, as attracting and retaining a quality workforce is a concern for over 55% of manufacturers, according to the National Association of Manufacturers Q4 2024 Manufacturers’ Outlook Survey. Tooling challenges and long lead times have direct financial and operational consequences that impact profitability and competitiveness. Global supply chain instability has extended lead times for outsourced tooling, delaying production and putting customer relationships at risk.
Molders with efficient in-house toolrooms have a competitive advantage with the ability to accelerate tooling production, control quality, and meet tight customer deadlines. Tooling automation provides a way to reduce mold tooling lead time, streamline tool builds, expand capacity without adding scarce labor, and secure new business by offering faster turnaround times on both production and prototype molds.
Mantle’s automated toolmaking system helps molders reduce mold tooling lead times and overcome these challenges by integrating metal 3D printing with CNC machining. The easy-to-operate system enables molders to quickly and reliably produce steel tooling in-house, reducing lead times and improving production flexibility.
Reduce Mold Tooling Lead Time to Meet Customer Demands Faster
Delays put molders at risk of losing contracts to competitors, so speed is critical for customer retention and business growth. However, long lead times for tooling – whether built in-house or outsourced – create interruptions that impact production schedules. Traditional mold manufacturing processes often take 8-12 weeks or more, making it challenging to offer agile solutions that quickly respond to changing customer demands.
With Mantle’s automated toolmaking system, molders can significantly cut mold tooling lead times and maximize production flexibility to meet customer deadlines and take on more projects. Optimizing in-house tooling production means molders can shorten lead times to respond faster to customer needs without being bottlenecked by third-party delays or supply chain disruptions.
- Reduce mold tooling build times by weeks using the Mantle to automate toolmaking, minimizing lead times.
- Automate toolmaking to overcome labor shortages while operating efficiently.
- Accelerate mold validation and approval cycles, helping customers de-risk innovation and bring products to market faster.
INJECTION MOLD CORE AND CAVITY
CAM LOCK LATCH
Nicolet Plastics used the Mantle automated toolmaking system to produce this injection mold core and cavity in H13 tool steel. Mantle’s automated toolmaking process reduced mold tooling lead times by four weeks – cutting operations time by 93%.
- Lead time reduced from 6 weeks to 2 weeks
- Operations time reduced from 180 hours to 12 hours
- Molded with Nylon PA 6/6 35% glass-filled
Gain Control Over the Tooling Supply Chain
Relying on external shops or overseas suppliers for tooling may reduce short-term costs. However, it introduces significant risks, from extended lead times to quality inconsistencies. Rework is costly, and outsourcing means molders have limited flexibility to impress customers when last-minute design changes are needed.
Bringing toolmaking in-house or bolstering the production of your toolroom by adding toolmaking automation gives molders complete control over the tooling process – and the ability to make it a strategic advantage. With toolmaking automation, molders can streamline operations, reduce supply chain risks, and offer customers the highest-quality parts on time.
- Avoid outsourcing delays, reducing supply chain risks while improving scheduling and quality control.
- Improve responsiveness by quickly adjusting tooling designs This will enable faster iterations and the production flexibility to best serve your customers.
- Reducing reliance on skilled manual labor in toolmaking operations will enable existing employees to focus on higher-value work, such as final finishing and assembly.
Expand Capacity Without Additional Labor
The shortage of skilled toolmakers is one of the biggest challenges facing manufacturers today. The toolmaking labor shortage makes scaling up operations through conventional means increasingly tricky. Relying on traditional toolmaking methods alone is no longer a sustainable path for growth.
Mantle’s automated toolmaking system allows molders to expand toolroom capacity without needing additional hard-to-find skilled toolmakers. Instead of turning away jobs or delaying delivery due to labor shortages, molders can use toolmaking automation to increase output and maximize efficiency—without adding headcount.
- Automate up to 95% of toolmaking production at the press of a button, increasing throughput without increasing headcount.
- Operate lights out and change over with minimal operator intervention to keep production going—even during vacations or longer-term labor shortages.
- Streamline workflows by easily creating ribs, deep pockets, or blind features during the tool build, eliminating the need for sinker EDM operations.
REDUCED MOLD TOOLING LEAD TIME
WESTEC PLASTICS
“We simply started the printer Friday afternoon; it ran unattended all weekend! Monday morning, our team examined the completely printed inserts.
With just a few hours of our teams’ time, we were able to produce H13 steel mold inserts.
Mantle’s technology is vital for helping us expand our capacity since we can increase our tool room throughput with a lights-out machine, running 24/7 with very little direct man-hours”
-Tammy Barras, President at Westec Plastics
Reduce Tooling Lead Times to Prototype Faster & Win More Business
In today’s competitive landscape, molders offering faster turnaround times and lower-cost prototype tooling have a significant advantage in building a lasting partnership with their customers. Those customers often require prototype and bridge tooling to validate designs before investing in a production tool.
Mantle’s automated toolmaking system creates production-grade steel tooling, allowing for the molding of production-representative parts for customers’ trials and approvals. Using tool-steel tooling from the early stages of development, customers can validate designs, optimize molding parameters, and confidently accelerate product launches, especially in highly regulated industries and when working with engineered plastics.
With Mantle, toolrooms have the flexibility to print multiple designs simultaneously – in some cases, Mantle customers print 10 design variations in one build for parallel testing and faster validation. By leveraging this technology to reduce mold tooling lead times, molders differentiate themselves in the market, take on more prototype work, and position their business as a long-term partner for both early-stage and full-scale production.
- Reduce tooling costs, making low-volume and bridge tooling more feasible.
- Offer quick-turn prototype tooling and produce multiple mold insert design variations simultaneously to iterate and refine quickly, optimizing molding process parameters and bringing better-quality products to market faster.
- De-risk production and eliminate costly delays by validating manufacturing processes with steel tooling and end-use plastic material, allowing customers to use production representative parts for certification and trials.
Maximize Tooling Performance with Conformal Cooling
Beyond speed and efficiency, molders can further enhance their ROI in toolmaking automation by unlocking the benefits of conformal cooling. Using additive manufacturing as part of its hybrid process to deposit and shape tool steel, Mantle’s automated toolmaking system efficiently creates internal channels without the manufacturability constraints of CNC-machining.
Even by incorporating basic cooling channels that follow the shape of the mold, built easily without added time and cost during the automated 3D printing process, molders capitalize on faster cycle times and improved part quality. Advanced users can continuously innovate cooling designs and optimize their tooling when paired with molding simulation software.
- Reduce cycle times by improving cooling efficiency with channels that follow the shape of the mold for better heat dissipation.
- Enhance process stability by maintaining consistent temperatures throughout the mold to improve repeatability and prevent warping and shrinkage that leads to defects.
- Extend tool life by reducing thermal stresses on your molds.
INJECTION MOLD CORE AND CAVITY
HANDLE
Mantle’s automated toolmaking system helps Nicolet Plastics decrease the lead time of this injection mold tooling by two weeks while easily incorporating conformal cooling channels. Toolmaking automation allowed the H13 tooling to be made in-house while still being competitive with the traditional overseas vendors.
- Lead time reduced from 8 weeks to 6 weeks
- Brought tooling production in-house, eliminating offshore delays
- Molded with Nylon PA 6/6 35% glass-filled
An Automated Way for Molders to Approach Toolmaking
For molders looking to reduce lead times and improve production agility, toolmaking automation is the solution to help deliver faster and win more business. Take control of your tooling supply chain and expand your toolroom’s capacity to secure more work.
