Company Name: Custom Rotary Converting, Inc.

Company Type: Manufacturing

Company Profile

Mission Statement

Custom Rotary Converting, Inc. is a contract manufacturer whose core competence is finding cost effective converting solutions in order to produce parts for our customers and thereby building long term, mutually beneficial relationships. CRC will create a positive atmosphere in its customer relations and among its employees so that the benefits will be counted in more meaningful terms than money alone.

Core Competence

CRC's core competence is engineering and implementing manufacturing solutions to converting challenges. CRC has a unique combination of converting experience, engineering skills and machine building capability.

What this means to our Customers

CRC is a resource to you for finding materials and the most practical configuration for manufacturing. If you get us involved early in your process, we can share our knowledge of materials and processes to optimize your product or solve your problems in a minimum of time. We can work with you through the prototype, pilot run, and production phases of your project. We work hard for your business because our customers' satisfaction is crucial to our success.

CRC's facilities

CRC is situated on 2 acres with manufacturing, warehouse space, offices, yard space, and room to grow.

A light tight clean room in which we convert light sensitive products and those requiring a high level of cleanliness.

A dry room capable of maintaining %20 RH.

8 rotary presses with capacities ranging from 6.5" to 10" wide.

Ultrasonic rotary die cutting and sealing

Steel rule presses: Clicker & auto feed 24" x 24" capacity.

Hot melt coaters: 10" roll coater and slot coaters for thin layers and pattern coating.

'baloney' slitter for slitting rolls without unwinding them .

A complete machining, welding, and sheet metal shop

In addition, we have a complete machine shop and weld shop. We build most of our own equipment and the accessories needed to run special converting jobs.

About Company

I started CRC in 1986 after having worked in a computer disk manufacturing company and spending a year consulting to rotary die manufacturers. Having seen a high tech company peek and crash. The technology behind rotary converting seemed to me both more stable and with a longer useful life. Like computers, converting is used in a wide variety of industries and products. Converting technology is also evolving, but there is not the rapid obsolescence built into the computers.

The initial plan was to use my knowledge of converting and engineering and offer converting services to the trade. This is why the company is called Custom Rotary Converting (now Inc.). Indeed, we got some challenging jobs from the start. We still get repeat orders for the first product we made.

The first years were a real struggle as the business was 'boot strapped' with the help of a small family loan and a heavy dose of sweat equity. I was fortunate enough to have some friends who worked with me in those early days of hard work and little pay. Fructuoso and Teresa Gomez are still with me today.

My engineering background prepared me for the technical challenges, but not for the accounting or marketing hurdles. To make it through those times, we took on consulting work and the building of die cutting modules. Gradually, we made and rebuilt larger segments of converting machinery, until we had the opportunity to design and build a complete floppy disk jacket machine. In the early '90s, we sold several of these machine, as well as a slitter and some other floppy machinery, to companies in mainland China.

Eventually, the floppy disk market died, even in China. In the next few years we tried to find a niche in the converting machinery market in the US. We build several custom machines and developed a line of modular presses which we hoped would give us a product to sell rather than a service. While we sold a few machines, the sales were erratic and most customers wanted the machines to be customized to their particular needs. While we never lacked work, we encountered unacceptable cash flow swings and could not grow.

In '96, after analyzing the books and reviewing our goals, we reached the decision to get back to our original focus. Thus started our transition away from building machinery for others, towards building our own machinery base and offering services. We had also learned a few hard lessons about accounting and marketing. In '98 we dropped our machine building ads and took out full page ads under die cutting. We also built the clean room, purchased the steel rule cutting equipment and built a 60" laminator/slitter as well as several narrow web presses.

The win-win nature of relationships between customer and converter played a major roll in our deciding to focus on providing die cutting services. Because the business activities tend to be fairly regular (once a month, a quarter or a year) there is a mutual interest in each other's well being. We get most of our business through word of mouth. There is a good reason for this: we take care of our customers and they appreciate it. We also like going home at night knowing we are part of our customer's success.

Having sold equipment to many of the local converters and knowing them personally, we decided to go after technologies that would complement their efforts instead of competing directly with them. That is why we focus on rotary cutting, wide web slitting, and hot melt coating. In mid '98. anticipating rapid growth, we incorporated the business.

In 1999, we were able to purchase the property which we had rented for the last 13 years. This was a big boost to us since it allowed to make structural changes and optimize the buildings for our use.

We have seen our greatest growth in areas requiring special skills and equipment such as ultrasonic die cutting, hot melt coating of specialty films, inline die cutting and packaging, and medical products requiring clean rooms.

CRC is moving to a new level of growth where we can now pursue large industrial customers who require many millions of parts made per year. It is with these customers that our core competence come to best use: we develop processes and machinery which will make large volumes of complex converted parts efficiently.