I’ve been with Acrylon Plastics for 25 years. Around 1998, we started to replace our older equipment and chose Ferry Industries as our major supplier. Since then, we’ve bought four rotational molding machines from them. In Winnipeg, we have an RS-220, RS-330, and RS-370. In Winkler, we have an RS-430 — all four-arm independent arm machines.
Our experience has been very positive. It starts with their sales team. I deal primarily with their international sales manager, Ann Rowland, and the owner, Harry Covington. It’s been a very good experience. When it came time to order the machines, they were very helpful in providing options that we might want. The installation and scheduling worked out well for us, too. We do have other brand-name machines and certainly have had much less success with those. The Ferry machines have done well — from buying them to having them installed, everything has gone smoothly.
All four of the machines are workhorses — they just keep on going. They’re built in such a way that we’ve had very little downtime. We had a homemade machine prior to having Ferry machine, and it was constantly broken. We couldn’t rely on it and therefore scheduling became a real problem. That doesn’t work when you have JIT customers that you’re serving. The Ferry machines have been very reliable.
As far as service goes, we’ve very seldom had a Ferry service person here because we can do everything ourselves, but we do buy parts from them. However, we recently had a service person here because the machines were 15 years old, so we had them upgraded with new computers. As far as acquiring the parts, they’ve been great to work with. Ann Rowland is fabulous. I can email her any time of day and get an answer. I highly recommend them. I’ve had people in here before for a tour and to talk about different machines. They were debating on which brand name machine they should buy, and I highly recommended a Ferry because of its very little downtime.
