There's a special room at Swagelok Northern California, right across the hall from a room where we do customer training. We call this special room our Customer Briefing Center. If you thought that Swagelok was just about valves and fittings, your jaw will drop when you see what we have waiting for you in the CBC.
Yes, valves and fittings still form the bedrock of Swagelok's catalog. But we also offer a Custom Solutions service to create parts or combinations of parts specific to our customers' needs.
It can be something as simple as creating a special bend in a single piece of tubing, or as complex as putting together entire sampling systems with complex configurations of custom bent tubing.
Our team can put together panels, actuators, controls and other devices, doing all the assembly work so you don't have to.
More than that, though, we have the experience and specialized tools to create assemblies that do the maximum amount of work in the minimum amount of space.
Our custom solutions services also include pre-engineered subsystems. These units use Swagelok components predesigned and pre-assembled for use anywhere that fluids are processed. They range from simple welds to complex manifolds.
The list includes fluid distribution headers, sample probe modules, calibration and switching modules, and more.
At our Customer Briefing Center, you can see an entire working fluid system created by Swagelok Northern California. Five panels line the walls of the room, each showcasing a separate subsystem: gas delivery, distribution and flow control, process, hydraulic, and analytical instrumentation. (We'll give a detailed description of each panel in other posts.)
"The Customer Briefing Center is like having your trophies in a display case," said Neil Ide, our Custom Solutions product manager. "We want to show our customers that we are very capable of handling anything they want to throw at us as far as Custom Solutions go."
It also was an opportunity for us to show the diversity of Swagelok's products. Those panels feature more than 90 percent of the Swagelok product line.
In addition to showing off the capabilities of Swagelok Northern California, the Customer Briefing Center has a lot of practical value.
"We wanted something that could be used to demonstrate fluid system interaction from a nuts-and-bolts standpoint," Ide says. "It is frequently used as a training tool to show people what is possible, and to inspire, and educate them on the fundamentals of fluid technology."
Frequently our customers will have one need or requirement, and the Customer Briefing Center inspires them to consider other ways to improve their systems. We can take them into the room and demonstrate a variety of principles and parts.
The five panels are interconnected and fully functional. You won't see any "Don't Touch" signs in the CBC. We want customers to turn knobs, push buttons and try out the touch screens. It's an engaging way to better understand fluid systems.
"This person had very little knowledge of the science of fluid system technology, and just rudimentary knowledge of fluid dynamics going in," Ide says.
"After spending a couple hours a week for the better part of a year, they are now training other associates on the nuts and bolts. It has been a tremendous transformation."
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