Case Study: How a Rubber Manufacturer Saved 18% on Material Costs with Gomaplast Dosing System
A mid-size rubber compounding facility serving automotive and industrial markets replaced their manual weighing process with a Gomaplast GMI semi-automatic batch weighing system. Twelve months later, material waste was down 18%, batch rejections had dropped by 95%, and the system had paid for itself in nine months.
Facility Profile
The Problem: Three Years of Unexplained Quality Variation
The facility had been experiencing a pattern of quality problems that their process engineering team couldn't attribute to a consistent root cause. Batch rejection rate averaged 1.6% — not catastrophic, but generating approximately $34,000 annually in rework and scrap costs at their batch sizes and material prices.
More concerning was the customer complaint pattern: consistent, repeatable production issues in one compound family that periodically produced parts at the low end of hardness specification. Root cause investigations consistently came back to "compound variation" — but with paper batch records and no actual weight data, they couldn't confirm whether it was a weighing issue or a mixing issue.
The operations director commissioned a three-month manual audit: a quality technician spot-checked 15% of batches by weighing ingredients before and after dispensing. The results were illuminating: average over-dosing of accelerator was 3.1%. Sulfur loading varied by ±4.2% from recipe specification. The compound variation causing their customer complaints was almost entirely attributable to manual weighing inconsistency.
"We'd been chasing a mixing problem for three years. It was a weighing problem all along. We just didn't have the data to see it."
Results at 12 Months Post-Installation
18%
~$94,000/year on $520K material spend
0.08%
Down from 1.6% with manual weighing
115
Up from 42 with two operators
9 months
Faster than pre-purchase projection of 15 months
3 hrs/quarter
Down from 2 full days with paper records
−72%
Year-over-year, 12 months post-installation
Implementation Timeline
Specification & Site Survey
Gomaplast technical team conducted a site survey to assess bin storage requirements, carousel footprint, PLC network integration points, and scale positioning. Recipe data was audited against ERP master formulations — seven inconsistencies were found and corrected before system configuration.
Manufacturing & Configuration
The 10-station carousel system was manufactured and configured at the Gomaplast facility. PLC recipe library was loaded with all 47 active compound formulations. ERP integration (SAP MM/PP) was specified and interface mapping completed.
Installation & Commissioning
Physical installation over a planned 4-day production shutdown. PLC commissioning and ERP interface testing. Operator training — all four production operators plus the quality manager completed Gomaplast's operator certification program.
Parallel Operation
Full parallel operation: the Gomaplast system ran alongside the legacy manual process. All batch records were compared. 100% agreement on weight data after addressing one initial ERP unit-of-measure conversion issue.
Full Cutover
Manual weighing process retired. ERP integration live — production orders flow from SAP to the dosing station automatically. Batch completion data and actual weights return to SAP in real time.
Operations & Results
The facility tracked all key metrics against the pre-installation baseline. Material waste, rejection rate, throughput, and audit time all improved substantially beyond the pre-purchase projections.