Preventative Maintenance at JACO Manufacturing

A tool is an investment made by a company in order to produce the parts they need for a project. It is essential that every tool must last the life of the project. However, no matter the quality of tool built, it is of the utmost importance that the tool is properly maintained in order to meet the standard life of 1,000,000 cycles. At JACO, we take the preventative maintenance of our customer’s tools for our custom molding business very seriously, and it has allowed us to surpass the 1,000,000 cycle threshold on many of our customer’s tools over the years, with some tools made for simple geometry parts with nonabrasive materials surpassing up to 8 times the standard tooling’s life expectancy. According to our internal auditors, the preventative maintenance program we have put in place has been considered one of the most robust in the industry.

Our preventative maintenance program primarily relies on two factors for its success:

1. Dedicated personnel – JACO would not be able to accomplish what we do without the help of our people. We currently have 10 toolmakers in our shop and our tool room is staffed 24/5. This allows our tool room to be present around the clock for emergency repairs and for standard preventative maintenance in order to keep tools where they belong – running production.
2. IQMS – an ERP system utilized by the manufacturing industry. This program allows JACO to track everything within our facility from the number of cycles on a tool, our molding schedule, and all the way to tracking inventory and making shipments. If it can be tracked in IQMS within our facility, it is, as it allows us to have a full view of everything.

With IQMS, we can build a preventative maintenance schedule that is unique to all of the tools within our facility based on their individual needs dependent upon the tools design and the material being run through the tool. The schedule is first determined by over 70 years of plastic knowledge, and then adjusted based on the tools individual needs if necessary. After each production run, or during a production run if needed, a tool is taken back to the tool room for a full disassemble to complete the preventative maintenance that surpasses our competitors. During this cleaning the tooling is fully inspected for any wear during a 15 point checklist. If wear is seen on the tooling, it is fixed prior to going back into production in order to eliminate downtime on the production floor and guarantee our customers the level of quality that they have come to expect from JACO. In order to prevent irreparable damage, JACO works to catch problems with tools prior to something going wrong in production, which is why we build a schedule for preventative maintenance so that there are no tools left behind. No matter if it is a small run of a few hundred pieces, or if it is a million pieces, each tool is given the same JACO treatment at the end of the run. As previously stated, our preventative maintenance program has allowed us to extend the life of a significant number of tools throughout the years. Without this program, we simply wouldn’t be JACO.