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Mexichem expands laboratories with help from Swagelok Manchester
Swagelok Manchester worked with Mexichem to build a space-saving custom solution.
Mexichem is focused on growth and they like to bring value to their customers.
Swagelok has been helping us with that.
We delivered value to the customer because we managed
to bring in a whole host of different parts of our organization.
We went the extra mile on this order and it's going to benefit the customer.
It's just what we do.
Value beyond the expected. It's just what we do.
Even though our company is called Mexichem
it is actually in 19 different countries around the world.
We're in the UK based in Manchester.
We actually make the gas for refrigeration, car air conditioning, asthma inhalers
Our research facility has tripled in size.
taken on new people and
there's a big drive now to get new equipment built.
We started working with Gavin. Gavin Pettifer is the local Swagelok representative.
I received a call from Mexichem
from one of the project engineers.
And very quickly from there the whole project expanded as we started to
view the different areas that Mexichem wanted us to look at.
Space is mainly an issue because we're using toxic chemicals
and it needs to be in a ventilated area,
which the ventilated areas tend to be quite small.
When we used traditional fittings and pipework
we struggled to fit it in this space.
So we started to look at different ways
that we could actually put forward a complete solution for them.
What they were asking us to do was
actually to put in possibly 8 -- 12 laboratories within 2 years.
I very quickly brought in custom solutions manager Ronan Connell.
The experimentalists at Mexichem really are the key to this.
They know what they want to do with their experiment so we went through their
line diagram and tried to build an MPC system around that.
So to do that we had to first understand the system.
And we brought a field engineer in from Europe, which is Danny van den Burg.
Sitting down with the customer in person,
with the Manchester people, Ronan and Gavin.
With this whole team, we redesigned the system
and fine-tuned it and
made it according to the customer's requirements.
The design was made in the MPC configurator software.
That's where we work with to make the designs and translate the whole system
to customers.
From custom solutions Brandon Fry supported me.
He helped out in fine-tuning the design
and he mentioned what to change in the design to make it even more compact
and do actually smarter design. Brandon was, for me, the man.
He helped me out, really.
If there is a customer interested in MPC they're usually trying to
reduce the footprint of the system.
I will try to
maybe think of any ways we can reduce costs
so the smaller the system, the lower the cost
so it's going to benefit the customer
While we were building the MPC
Dave Kattler and the ETOP group were working on the DRP valve.
The customer sent in a schematic of valves that they had that wanted
Swagelok to quote on. We looked through it and saw that there were
standard manifold assemblies that we could do. I made some quick designs,
sent the drawings back to the customer as far as concept drawings go.
We got the end result for them.
The Teflon bodies are actually machined at our Highland facility
and they are assembled inside the clean room.
We delivered value to the customer because we managed to bring in a
whole host of different parts of our organisation.
Whereas the customer still needs one final solution but behind-the-scenes
we have the value of our
factory custom solutions group putting MPC systems together.
We have the field engineering staff
from a corporate point of view working with them.
We have the factory ETOP group
designing special valve arrangements for them.
We have our internal technicians working
on the final MPC system.
And we have the service of our Distributorship to make sure
all that product come together in one final solution.
We managed to, in a short time frame, develop some new
installations that are much easier to use, they are safer to use,
There's less down time, and lower maintenance
So that we can get on with our work
more effectively providing solutions for our customers.
6 values guide our people,
4 strategies guide our business,
1 global organization working toward a brighter future.
Value beyond the expected