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by Katie Dennis on Fri, Jan 23, 2015 @ 08:01 AM
Stacey has been with the Custom Solutions department since its inception at Edmonton Valve and looks forward to the departments continued growth in 2015
Whether it's just putting an adapter on a valve or building entire sampling systems, you can turn to Edmonton Valve & Fitting to pre-assemble a product and deliver it to you. And when you do, you'll probably interact with our Custom Solutions manager Stacey Phillips, and that means you are in good hands.
Phillips helped create the department. In fact, for a long time she was the department.
"In the early days, I would go from giving a quote to the customer, to processing the order, to going in the back and building it," Phillips says. She drilled panels, built enclosures, bent tubing, whatever was needed to help the customer.
Doing it all by herself gave her a lot of insight into the kind of associates she wanted to work with as the organization grew. When it came time to add people, she knew what to look for. And now there are four people in the custom solutions department full-time.
"We've been lucky in Alberta with the labour market the way it is. We have been able to find the right people. Culture is really important to us," she says.
Direct contact
Building a custom solution assembly requires a different work cycle than filling an order for parts. Rather than the account managers getting bogged down with all the technical requests, all they have to do is ask, "Are we able to do this?"
"I say yea or nay, and they have the ability to just drop it in my lap and I deal with their customer from there on in," Phillips says. Having done all the jobs, including running the CAD software, she has an excellent feel for her department's capabilities.
As the department has grown, Phillips has made sure everyone is communicating well, so that the same processes are used for every unit in a production run, and that someone can lend an extra hand on a contract and know just what to do.
Anything that needs to be assembled with Swagelok products, the crew can do. That includes orbital welding and complex tube bends. Some of the projects have been up to 10 feet by 10 feet.
Helping, not competing
Many of our Custom Solutions customers are instrumentation fabricators themselves.
"We really pride ourselves in helping our customers and not competing with them,” Phillips says. "For example, if they are building 15 enclosures, we’ll help them out by asking, how about us doing the tube bending? We have an automated tube bender, and have invested in the technology to do multiple, repeatable bends." This can help save our customers valuable time and they can allocate that to other resources.
Our tube bender can store the specifications in its memory. That's a key advantage if you are likely to need more of the same assemblies in the future. We can produce exact copies without having to reverse-engineer the specs from an existing unit.
Some of those customers have been so pleased with the results that they have us do the entire package now.
If you think that our custom solutions department could be a good fit with your organization, or you are interested in hearing more about our capabilities, contact our team here or call 780.437.0640.
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