SSG Partners with Customer to Achieve Efficiency, Effectiveness and Economy
Surface Solutions Group (SSG) identified an opportunity to help a customer that was coating their guidewires in house. Their process was inconsistent and wasted valuable coating material. Our goal was to apply the PTFE coating to the customer’s guidewires and eliminate the internal production quality issues, coating costs, coil-bound heavily coated rejects and quality costs associated with sorting through guidewires to find rejects.
By partnering with this large customer, we were able to develop precision coating of guidewires on a prototype automated coating line to prove that SSG’s method was a vast improvement in consistent coating application. This was followed by the construction of an ultra-accurate coating line for large scale production. SSG coats millions of guidewires per year for the guidewire industry, and provides other coating services for medical devices.
As a result of the success of this preliminary work, SSG invested in additional equipment to develop a second state-of-the-art coating line. This equipment not only accommodates larger production orders but also takes coating deposition accuracy capabilities to a higher level than previously thought possible. The line coats guidewires in lengths up to 485 cm. Our stringent quality system ensures accurate and uniform PTFE coating with no glue-like binding between coils.
Our customer decided to take advantage of SSG’s increased level of efficiency, effectiveness and economy by outsourcing all the coating work for their 94 guidewire lengths. It relied on our ability to coat round or flat guidewires, with diameters ranging from .018″ to .038″ and lengths ranging from 145 cm to 485 cm.
SSG has processed more than 3 million guidewires for this customer partner with virtually zero rejects over the last few years while saving it as much as 70% on PTFE raw material costs through the precise application of our state-of-the-art, automated coating line. SSG is proud to offer services to this medical device manufacturer to help them stay ahead of their competition.