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 a factory quote for a pressure regulator that was not in stock was required, 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 regulator assembly program. In consultation with Neil Ide, our custom solutions product manager, the customer was able to determine that the flow curves for one of our quick turn regulators were a good enough match with the his system parameters. As a result, we were able to deliver the regulator in 24 hours, and the customer's system was back up and running the next day.
Swagelok regulators come in a wide variety of 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. 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 perhaps 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 our 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.
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. If you do not need the pressure regulator immediately, you can still order the exact configuration you need,
It's easy to take advantage of both the simplicity and the wide range of possibilities. Just click here to download our product literature for our quick turn regulator assemblies, and you can download the catalogs on all of our pressure regulators here.
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