Our Swagelok Regulator Assembly Program Speeds Up Delivery

With so many configurations, more than one can often handle the job

Swagelok regulators come in an amazing variety of configurations. The K Series regulator can be configured about 10 million ways. We're not kidding. With all the different combinations of control ranges, body materials, inlet pressures, seat materials, sensing mechanisms and other factors, you literally can build millions of K Series valves without making two that are identical. Even our KPR Series, which is our general purpose regulator, could be built in about 2 million configurations.

That's fantastic when you need a very specific configuration to fit a very specific need. But what if some of the specifics don't matter all that much? What if you just need a general purpose regulator and you need it fast?

Neil Ide recently considered that challenge. He's our product manager for Assembly solutions, but in an earlier part of his career he was one of our customers. He remembered the days when, as a customer, he would ask for a specific configuration of regulator, which rarely seemed to be in stock, since even Swagelok Northern California can't keep millions of different regulators on the shelves.

Cutting through the clutter

The more he got to thinking about it, the more Ide realized that not every customer needs a highly individual combination of features. It seemed logical that most people are looking for a small range of parameters.

Ide had a team dig through Swagelok Northern California's business management software and pull up five years of data on customer requests for quotes on K Series regulators. He built an algorithm to decode the 16-digit part number that indicates the specific configuration of each regulator, and sorted out the parameters that most people were looking for.

"From there I took that data and used a histogram analysis to count the number of times that each parameter popped up," Ide says. "What came out was a very distinctive pattern that showed most people want around six different variations for what they are trying to do with pressure regulators."

Armed with that knowledge, we put regulator inventory on the shelves that would allow us to rapidly deliver that small cluster of popular features.

But wait, there's more

Had we stopped there, we would have made a lot of progress in better serving our customers.
Corey Gould, Customer Support Representative, put his budding software design skills to work on turning Ide’s standardized regulator configurations into an easy to use computer program that Swagelok Northern California customer support personnel could use to quickly configure and quote a regulator assembly.

By combining Ide's regulator configurations with Gould's newly created Regulator Configurator, we can now offer 24-hour turnaround on regulators that would fit about 80 percent of the requests we have had in the past five years. The beautiful part is that we haven't lost any of the variety that Swagelok offers. You can still order the exact configuration you need, even if no one else has ever ordered it before.

It's easy to take advantage of both the simplicity and the wide range of possibilities. Just click here to download our product literature on regulator assemblies. 

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