Our Swagelok Pressure Regulator Assembly Program Is Engineered to Deliver Fast

Pressure regulator and pressure gauge stocking program helps us speed up delivery

Our quick-turn pressure regulator assembly program has expanded to include 0-10, 0-25, 0-100 psig pressure control ranges. Learn more about our quick-turn Swagelok pressure regulator assemblies and get the program literature at http://northerncal.swagelok.com/pressure-regulator-assemblies

Ten million configurations

Swagelok pressure regulators come in an amazing variety of configurations. The K Series pressure 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 pressure regulators without making two that are identical.

Even our KPR Series, which is our general purpose pressure 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 pressure regulator and you need it fast?

Challenge accepted

Neil Ide recently considered that challenge. He's one our fluid system engineers, 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 pressure regulator, which rarely seemed to be in stock, since even Swagelok Northern California can't keep millions of different pressure regulators on the shelves.

Most common configurations

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 pressure regulators. He built an algorithm to decode the 16-digit part number that indicates the specific configuration of each pressure 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 pressure regulator inventory on the shelves that would allow us to rapidly deliver that small cluster of popular features.  

Quick-turn Swagelok pressure regulator assembly program recently expanded to include more pressure control ranges. 

Pressure regulator configurator

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

By combining Ide's regulator configurations with Gould's newly created Regulator Configurator, we can now offer 24 - 48 hour turnaround on pressure regulators that 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. If you have the time to wait, you can still order the exact configuration you need, even if no one else has ever ordered it before.

Program reviewed and expanded

Our assembly solutions team recently reviewed our pressure regulator assembly program to see if we have any holes in our quick-turn inventory. As a result of the review, we have expanded the program to include 0-50. 0-100, 0-250, and 0-500 psig gas bottle pressure regulator assemblies and 0-10, 0-25, 0-50, 0-100, and 0-250 psig inline pressure regulator assemblies.

Quick-Turn program in action

We recently received a phone call from a customer in desperate need of a pressure regulator. His system was down as a result of a pressure regulator that was not working anymore, so he needed a replacement right away.

His initial pressure and flow requirements looked like it required a factory quote for a pressure regulator that was not in stock, which would mean a lead time beyond the day or two that he could wait for a solution. Our customer service person reviewed his system's pressure regulator needs and compared it to the pressure regulators included in our quick turn pressure regulator assembly program.

In consultation with Ide the customer was able to determine that the flow curves for one of our quick-turn pressure regulators were a good enough match with his system parameters. As a result, we were able to deliver the pressure regulator in 24 hours, and the customer's system was back up and running the next day.

It's easy to take advantage of both the simplicity and the wide range of possibilities.

Just click here to download our pressure regulator assembly program literature, and you can download the catalogs on all of our pressure regulators here.

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