Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowKimball Electronics’ new Indianapolis site for contract manufacturing for the medical industry is big. How big?
Victory Field, home of the Indianapolis Indians, would just about fit perfectly inside the Jasper-based company’s new 307,000-square-foot facility at 1220 South Post Road.
The facility is expected to create 345 jobs in its first six years in operation and will be home to operations currently housed at two Kimball buildings across the street from each other on the east side of Indianapolis, at 2950 N. Catherwood Ave., and 6205 E. 30th St. The company said its current Indianapolis locations total about 140,000 square feet.
The company plans to finish the buildout in October, but the full transition into the new facility is expected to take two and a half to three years. Kimball Medical Solutions focuses on services including cold chain management, drug delivery device production, sterilization, disposable device production, scientific injection molding and clean room device assembly.
Tom Ferris, vice president of medical solutions for Kimball, recently sat down with IBJ at the new facility. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What are your plans for this building?
The buildings we occupy today weren’t built to suit the purpose of where the industry is as we stand today. We have lots of limitations there with roof height. The buildings were constructed and expanded over the years, and with expansion it kind of takes away flexibility because you end up with a lot of solid walls, different roof constructions and whatnot. Refurbishing there was not going to be cost effective and wasn’t going to give us what we needed, either, for growth.
Why are higher ceilings and space important for Kimball’s medical manufacturing?
If you consider injection molding, [it involves] very large equipment with mold tools in them. Those tools have to be taken in and out on a regular basis for maintenance or changing over to a different product. What’s changed a lot in manufacturing is, previously, you would have one person standing by a molding machine adjusting as things go. There’ll be a lot of adjustment and fluctuation from batch to batch. Today, it’s highly automated. We validate the equipment entirely, so there’s no ability for people to be able to make adjustments. There’s a lot of automated handling. When the mold tool opens and the parts are coming out, they’re being picked out of the machine rather being left to drop onto the belt, which would have been common in older mold practices. It’s about producing very high-quality products.
They’re life-saving devices in all instances, so we as well as our customers want confidence that if a surgeon takes something out of a sterile bag in surgery, it’s going to work the first time. Likewise, if somebody is going to inject themselves at home with an auto-injector, whether it be an epinephrine type of device or whatever, you want to be sure it’s going to work and it’s going to save their life.
What was the reaction of Kimball’s Indianapolis workers when you told them about the new facility?
Extremely excited! We didn’t want to move very far from our existing site because we didn’t want to burden our employees with an additional commute. We were very cognizant of that, and we’re very confident that all our employees are going to come with us.
When looking for a new facility for your Medical Solutions manufacturing, did you consider areas other than Indianapolis?
We never looked outside of Indianapolis. There’s a great talent pool in Indianapolis. We’ve got very talented people working for us today, and we don’t want to lose that. It takes a lot of time to bring people in, develop them and get that consistency. If you go to Jasper we have people with 40 years plus of service, and we want to build that in all our sites across the globe.
Kimball leased the new Indianapolis building. Is that a new model for the company expanding?
It’s a new model for us. We looked at Greenfield sites as well. If we go Greenfield, it’s two years plus to get through design permitting, getting the building built and getting occupancy. Going for the lease option, it gave us access to the building much faster, and we still have the option out there to acquire the building in the future if that meets our demand or our needs.
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.
Editor's note: You can comment on IBJ stories by signing in to your IBJ account. If you have not registered, please sign up for a free account now. Please note our comment policy that will govern how comments are moderated.