"Our project engineers live at our customers' locations, not ours."

Many years ago, Donnelly radically departed from how injection molders traditionally provide engineering support to clients. Today our project engineers no longer call Donnelly Custom Manufacturing "home." Instead they can be found at customer locations, where they serve as integral members of our customers' engineering teams.

Each project engineer is backed by a strong engineering support team at Donnelly's facility. This ensures the value the project engineer produces at the front end is supported throughout the manufacturing process.

Because they work at our customer locations, Donnelly's project engineers deepen customers' understanding of plastics processing, and have been instrumental in improving designs for manufacturing. In one case, Donnelly assisted in reducing the number of secondary operations from 45 to 20 and the number of parts from 30 to 18.

Before the tool-building even begins, our engineering support team plays a critical role by performing a thorough tool design review. Since many production problems stem from tool design deficiencies, our manufacturing launch engineering review is essential in making sure the tool is constructed properly and the launch goes smoothly.

As the tool moves to the approval phase, Donnelly's process engineers work closely with the manufacturing launch engineer to assess the mold-ability of each part. The manufacturing launch engineer's significant tooling competence is complemented by the process engineer's working knowledge of day-to-day production challenges. The end result is a synergy that makes sure each and every run is what it was intended to be: Short in both time and in number of parts.

Donnelly's engineering model provides our customers with unique value. The project engineers are able to focus their time and expertise on helping our customers leverage engineering opportunities. Opportunities like converting parts from metal to plastic, material selection, re-engineering products, and building molds that effectively deal with the challenges of the short-run molding.