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Progressive Components & MoldTrax Form Alliance

Mold Maintenance Authority Steve Johnson Joins Progressive Team 

Wauconda, IL U.S.A. -- Progressive Components has hired widely recognized mold maintenance authority Steve Johnson as Maintenance Systems Manager and formed an alliance with MoldTrax.  The announcement was made at NPE 2006 on June 19^th in Chicago. 

Johnson is probably best known in the industry for MoldTrax™, a comprehensive performance and maintenance documentation system for molds and dies, a product he designed and developed.  He subsequently formed his company MoldTrax to market and sell the system.  He also authors monthly columns “Across the Bench” and “The Mold Shop” for Moldmaking Technology and Plastics Technology magazines respectively, conducts mold maintenance seminars as part of Progressive’s ToolingDocs program, and works as a consultant to companies by performing in-house maintenance capability studies. 

Glenn Starkey, president of Progressive Components, stated, “Steve’s role with Progressive will be to further develop the presence of our software products for better mold management.  In addition, he will assist customers with their toolroom practices to help optimize the maintenance and performance of molds with collapsible cores, stack molds and other complex tooling.” 

Johnson comes to Progressive from medical device manufacturer Hospira, Inc., where he was a senior tooling engineer.  He worked at Hospira since 1999.  Prior to working there Johnson was a lead moldmaker at Calmar, Inc. from 1976 until he went over to Hospira.  At Calmar, he was responsible for repair, redesigning and rebuilding high cavitation, close-tolerance multicavity molds. 

“I’ve been working with Progressive since the second ToolingDocs conference four years ago,” commented Johnson.  “One of the things I’m really looking forward to is working with a number of different companies to help operations.  Many companies want to put a maintenance program in place and this will give me the freedom to help them address unique issues and really improve their maintenance efforts through a more systemized, six-sigma approach.”