Chinese facility boosts rubber product output

Greentree-Shercon's new state-of-the-art Hangzhou, China production facility is now online - and fabricating high-quality parts for the OEM market.

Greentree-Shercon's new state-of-the-art Hangzhou, China production facility is now online - and fabricating high-quality parts for the OEM market.

Shercon owns and operates the plant,and all design and engineering work is performed at Shercon's USA Southern California headquarters.

The 6700m2 Hangzhou facility has already received QS9000 Certification from BSI with TS16949 certification well advanced.

"Our OEM rubber products customers enjoy the best of the East and the West", said Keith Ennis, Shercon's CEO.

"We retain total control over production and quality".

"This allows us to leverage our considerable design expertise yet still offer extremely competitive pricing".

"Customer feedback has been great".

"Offshore manufacturing offers lower costs, but also offers traps for the unwary", said Ennis, who cited uncertain quality control, lot-to-lot inconsistency, exposure of trade secrets, and communications difficulties as chief among them.

Shercon's Hangzhou plant bypasses these by controlling mixing, production and testing under one roof, while all engineering and project management remains in the hands of Shercon's USA-based engineering teams.

Enabling this transcontinental workflow is Shercon's Streamline project software, which tracts and manages project flow, and also allows real-time, online collaboration between designers, production staff, and customers.

"Our US-based design and project teams eliminate the communications gap that many experience due to time or language differences - you can pick up the phone and find out exactly what's happening with your project", said Ennis.

The Hangzhou facility includes an on-site test laboratory, and an entire manufacturing process specifically geared to producing repeatable, high quality production runs which exceed customer specifications.

To make this possible, Shercon created a sophisticated, in-house test facility that performs a wide range of tests (to ASTM standards) including tensile, elongation, tear, compression set, heat aging, MDR, hardness and dielectric strength.

"Every step of the process - from our advanced product quality planning (APQP) system to production control to final parts inspection and packaging - has been designed to produce parts of the highest quality, and do it production run after production run", said Ennis.

As a result, compound formulation is handled on-site as opposed to using outside suppliers, with all production batches subjected to MDR, SG, hardness, tensile and elongation tests.

After mixing and preliminary testing, Shercon's OEM rubber products are fabricated using brand new, state-of-the-art equipment.

"Our production equipment is the best available", said Ennis.

"Feedback from customers who have visited the factory is that we are years ahead".

With customers and representation throughout the world, Shercon is able to meet the local and international rubber moulding requirements of most types of industry.

In the UK and Ireland Shercon is represented by Greentree-Shercon which offers on-site visits and full technical advice to support customer needs.

Back to top