Until last spring, the engineers at iMFLUX largely thought of themselves as the ones who make the machines that make so much of the stuff of everyday life. The company’s plastic-injection molds and systems have produced untold quantities of shampoo bottle caps, laundry-bead packages, and home-care devices for its owner and largest customer, Procter & Gamble. Each mold is a massive and massively complex one-of-a-kind steel apparatus designed to run without interruption for years. But as much of the U.S. began shutting down in March to curb the COVID-19 pandemic, America’s factories stilled, raising an unprecedented risk of cancelled orders—and an opportunity to reinvent the company on the fly.
“When COVID hit, it didn’t really scare us in terms of how we adapt,” recalls Dan Lumpkin, vice president of mold shop operations at iMFLUX, and a veteran of both Apple and P&G. Rather, he says, the questions turned to, “What do we have to stop?” and “Where do we have to shift…
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Source : fastcompany.com
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