Process & Collaboration: The Tru-Form Way

Tru-Form is not a one-size-fits-all company… and this is how we like it.

Manufacturers (or any company, really) understand their customers need to trust them to meet all their production needs, and businesses like Tru-Form Plastics don’t take that trust lightly. We understand each project is unique and has different needs for thermoformed components, which means our services need to be tailored precisely to each customer.

From First Design to Final Production

Tru-Form’s tagline – Imagine. Design. Deliver. – shows how passionate we are about transforming ideas into quality parts and assemblies. When we say we treat our customers as partners, we mean it: we stay by your side throughout the whole production process. We collaborate with you from the beginning with DFM, tooling design, and fabrication all the way through final production, warehousing, and shipping.

At Tru-Form, we have a wide range of capabilities, such as:

• Expert engineers to develop tooling for our customers’ designs
• Heavy gauge and thin gauge thermoforming
• Reverse engineering for legacy and replacement parts
• An in-house pattern and tool-making shop
• A full-featured customer service department for contract review, quoting, and project management
• Complete Quality Assurance (QA)/Quality Control (QC) departments in an AS9100 / ISO 9001 environment
• 74,000 sq. ft. manufacturing and warehouse facility for handling, storage, and shipping anywhere in the world

Tru-Form’s goal is always to understand your criteria and uncover opportunities to innovate. It’s important to us to align with your vision, stay in scope, and keep pace with your project needs, which is why we have developed our method called the TFP Process.

Innovation with the TFP Process

At Tru-Form, we consistently look for ways to increase efficiency in material usage, ensuring speed to market while saving customers money. Through the development of the TFP Process, we have determined there are four ways in which our team is able to earn our customers’ trust:

1. We collaborate from the beginning, starting with the DFM process.
2. We embrace difficult assignments and don’t back down from a challenge.
3. We deliver innovation so customers know they are getting the best product.
4. We increase total speed to market by passing validation the first time.

For every new project Tru-Form starts, we form a Task Team to gather all necessary and relevant resources to evaluate everything, providing a clear and concise blueprint for all team members to follow. Our Task Teams ensure everyone knows what is going on and what role they must play in developing any new products for customers. With Tru-Form’s fully staffed Quality Control department under the guidance of professionals with decades of QA experience, our customers can rest assured their parts will be manufactured precisely how they need them.

In addition to creating Task Teams, Tru-Form invests in the latest machinery, such as our new Sencorp ULTRA High-Speed In-Line Thermoformer, which can run jobs more quickly and accurately than other thermoforming equipment. It produces better quality parts in less time, and at a cost that allows Tru-Form to be competitive for custom thermoforming of large and small batch run jobs.

Helping Customers through the TFP Process

The TFP Process may sound excellent on paper, but what about in practice? Many customers, in fact, have benefited from the TFP Process over the years. One of these customers was an airline manufacturer in need of toilet shroud thermoforms for airplane bathrooms.

The tooling and process used by this customer had always been labor intensive, involving 3-4 operators to manually drape, form, and release the parts from tooling. When they came to Tru-Form, our team was able to work with our large tool fabrication partners to develop a design that incorporated state-of-the-art articulated mold features that can be manipulated mechanically as part of the forming process. The tool design our team developed reduced the amount of labor needed to make the parts, and by utilizing the automatic forming process, we reduced the amount of variation inherent in the older method of production. Our process saved our customer a lot on overall costs to produce and operate the tooling, and the addition of the articulated components made this project a “first of its kind” tool to produce this class of thermoformed parts.

Whenever our team has a project which calls for tooling too large to fit our in-house machines in the mold shop, or if we have a backlog to expedite a tooling project, we call upon the expertise and resources of our tooling partners. Even when facing a difficult challenge with this tooling project, Tru-Form refused to back down, and we were able to get the parts needed at a reduced cost.

Imagine. Design. Deliver.

Based in Southern California, Tru-Form Plastics is a trusted custom thermoformer focused on flawless execution with optimized processes for a wide range of manufacturing industries. With our 100 years of combined experience amongst a dynamic team of thermoforming experts, we delight our customers through efficient design for manufacturability, prototyping, production, assembly, and on-time delivery. As an AS9100 and ISO 9001:2015 company, Tru-Form develops imaginative, engineered solutions for some of the most complex applications. We have the capabilities and capacity to serve Fortune 50 companies and are nimble enough to quickly adjust to the needs of startup companies to take on low-volume, high-mix, and high-volume, low-mix projects.

Want to learn more about how the TFP process can help your bottom line? Contact our team today to start a conversation!