Plastic injection moulding company PTA Plastics has reduced finishing defects in its facilities by 86% after achieving MedAccred Accreditation for its plastics assembly and injection moulding operations.

With headquarters in Oxford, Connecticut and a second facility in Longmont, Colorado, the employee-owned business provides a variety of specialised services to the medical devices industry. These include design engineering, mould-making, injection moulding, specialised moulding and process validation.

MedAccred is an industry managed supply chain oversight program that focuses on critical manufacturing processes in the medical device industry to enhance patient safety, improve quality and reduce product recalls.

Audit requirements for MedAccred are set by its subscribers, which include some of the largest manufacturers in the medical device sector – including Bausch Health, Baxter, BD, Boston Scientific, Edwards Lifesciences, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic, Philips, Roche Diagnostics and Stryker. PTA Plastics was the first company in the world to achieve MedAccred accreditation for plastics assembly.

Greg Fish, PTA’s corporate director of quality, explained why gaining MedAccred Accreditation was a priority: “Many of our customers are MedAccred subscribers. When we learned about the program, we set about gaining recognition to validate the quality of our services and our output, around the world.”

PTA Plastics took a highly focused approach to achieving its two accreditations, aiming to achieve them in just a few months. The company has passed hundreds of customer audits over the years, but still had work to do based on MedAccred gap analysis. For example, they documented processes that weren’t already recorded for International Organization for Standardization (ISO) purposes, to eliminate the possibility of problems with ‘tribal knowledge’. The company has also revised part-specific work instructions to make them simple to follow and reduce the possibility of mistakes.

Fish added: “Improving our processes to gain Accreditation has given us a globally recognised mark of conformity. It has also enabled us to reduce finishing defects by 86% and cut internal scrap from 2.78% to 1.81% of parts produced, so our business performance has also seen an uptick.”

Bob Lizewski, vice president, MedAccred, said: “PTA Plastics took a rigorous approach to achieving their Accreditations and we’re delighted that they are reaping the benefits. MedAccred Accreditation verifies that companies are working to industry-accepted quality standards and meet all US regulatory requirements, giving their customers reassurance that their work is in safe hands.”