“With product tolerances of .0002 of an inch, our focus is on precision and consistency,” said George Kloos, Director of Quality for DRT Mfg. Co. Founded by the inventor of the pop-can top that we use today, DRT focuses on designing and manufacturing the machines that make high volume container products. “We make the machines that make the pop-top containers today,” said Kloos.”DRT is also a contract manufacturer for the medical device industry.”

“Because what we manufacture requires precision, we needed a software product that was real-time and would immediately provide the operator instant feedback about their machine. Synergy gave us that.”
— George Kloos, Director of Quality for DRT Mfg. Co.

DRT began looking for Statistical Process Control  (SPC) software to meet the requirements of one of its new clients. “Because what we manufacture requires high precision, we needed a software product that was real-time and would immediately provide the operator feedback about their machine,” Kloos said. “Synergy gave us that.” Kloos remembers a time when they had a customer that left them for a competitor over price. The competitor wasn’t as consistent as DRT and now the customer is coming back to DRT. “Quality won the day,” commented Kloos.

“One of the things we really like is that we can do a lot of things with this SPC software,” Kloos remarked. “The software is very flexible. We’re not tied to any one machine.” Kloos also mentioned that because they work with tight tolerances, they made it a priority to setup gage interfaces so they would not require human intervention to eliminate any human error entering data.

Some of the processes involved a lot of integration between the machines, the gages and the Synergy software. “We needed to build custom interfaces. Zontec helped us overcome this hurdle,” Kloos said. “That was critical in the Synergy implementation.”

Kloos mentioned that Synergy has helped DRT achieve cost reductions. “With Synergy we are able to achieve cost reductions by reducing scrap, rework, and cycle time to produce a quality product.” Synergy also helped DRT to build a better quality product by making the data available earlier, which provides the company a fact based view of its processes, resulting in a better product. “Synergy allows us to use pre-control limits during production to maximize tool wear while maintaining a good product,” said Kloos.

One of the key components in the relationship between Zontec and DRT has been customer service. “Warren Ha (President of Zontec) has been a great help for us. Warren always came through for us. We really appreciate his help,” said Kloos.