May 2008 Edition

managing for tomorrow

Shortcuts for subassemblies

Tubing and machining expert makes OEMs an offer hard to resist

By Douglas Clark

Complicated assembly at one time required negotiating with many parts suppliers, in-house tube cutting with brazing, plus a building and storage capacity that stole space from other important needs. So after years of tolerating the process, which made inventory management as complex as air traffic control at a major airport, Thermal Product Solutions decided it was time for a change.

Now the Pennsylvania manufacturer of temperature test chambers enjoys one-stop shopping. It no longer sweats subassembly deadlines or concerns itself with tracking the availability of parts. And it’s enjoying huge savings from lower inventory costs.

"Instead of building ahead of time, and eating up man hours so that we always had inventory on hand, we just place the order and get finished subassembly just in time to build the chamber," says Rick Powell, a TPS project manager for environmental cooling. "In the past, we might have to buy 20 components just to have them sitting here when we needed them. Now, if we need five prebuilt assemblies, that’s all we order. And if we get an uptick in business, we order more."

Test chambers

The test chambers Powell oversees are used in virtually every industry one can imagine. The temperature bench top and floor model test chambers are suited for use in electronic, military, and pharmaceutical quality assurance and reliability testing, as well as research testing and production processes. They are designed to meet the rigorous standards of today’s research labs. And each chamber requires a cascade refrigeration system, a complicated 100-piece maze of copper tubing, soldered joints and brass machined parts.

"It’s the meat and potatoes of our chamber," Powell notes. "These are complex. They’re not just two or three little tubing bends. This is a proprietary design that took 30 years to develop."

For that reason, he says it wasn’t easy finding a company to take on his firm’s subassembly burden. Several companies wanted nothing to do with the complicated procedure. Others bid too high to be acceptable. Fortunately, the solution to the problem was closer to home than he realized.

TPS had been purchasing copper tubing from Spinco Metal Products. The upstate New York firm has been supplying the air-conditioning and refrigeration industry with specialized tubular and machined component parts and assemblies since 1966. More importantly, over the years, Spinco has built a state-of-the-art facility that includes the kind of specialized tooling equipment that goes far beyond what TPS and other firms can do. Spinco’s expert capabilities meant they could, for example, build the TPS components with fewer soldered joints, which reduced the potential for leaks.

In short, they could take away TPS’s pain and deliver a superior product.

Improvements

"We took them a subassembly product and said we’d like them to build it," Powell says. "And they said, ‘We can do it as you’ve designed it, or we can improve it.’ They’ve improved it greatly, rather than just repeat what we were doing. TPS doesn’t form tubing. We buy it on a roll and cut it. Spinco can actually mill that fitting and mold it into a pipe. And they reduced our soldered joints. So if we took them something with 15 fittings, those fittings could equal 35 joints. They could do the same with only eight joints, because they don’t use an elbow piece, they can bend the tubing," Powell says.

TPS now purchases about 10 different subassemblies from Spinco, and that’s just fine with the firm’s owner and president, Bob Straubing.

"We’ve been doing this kind of value-added work for the last five years," he says. "Before then, we were selling a lot of tubing and small lots of parts to our clients. When we discovered TPS was getting component parts from at least three different places and putting it all together themselves, we said, ‘Why don’t you let us do that?’ It’s what we want to do for everyone who has a complicated assembly."

Powell says Spinco works with the vendors TPS had used to supply fittings and valves. And when a part needed for assembly is no longer available, Spinco quickly offers replacement suggestions. Also, TPS no longer has to stock parts purchased from vendors. That’s Spinco’s responsibility. And so is the air-traffic-control-like nightmare of tracking incoming parts.

Meeting the need

Powell appreciates the change.

"I don’t have to figure out why we don’t have a particularly part," he says. "It’s Spinco’s problem. I don’t think about it anymore. It’s more a commodity now. It’s something we buy and don’t think about, other than placing an order for 15, or whatever, and a week later 15 show up. And if we get an uptick in business, we call Spinco and say we need 30, not 15. Since they build ahead, they can ship them right down or change their production to meet our needs. It’s a whole series of events we don’t have to go through anymore."

Not that there aren’t occasional bumps in the production line. A small part within the subassembly may malfunction. Perhaps it’s a part purchased from a new vendor. In the past, such an event would have caused nerve-wracking slowdowns. Now TPS has a partner that has a vested interest in finding the problem fast and correcting it. Powell says Spinco’s "transparent tracking" system and its tried-and-true quality-control standards provide peace of mind because the firm understands that a malfunction in the field can be costly to a company like TPS.

"I just know that whenever we do have a concern, they’re more than willing to address it," Powell says. "We don’t bicker. When we’ve had issues, a Spinco team travels here, or we travel as a group to their plant."

Straubing says the Spinco Metal Products quality department is consistently monitoring the requirements of the compressor manufacturers, desiccant manufacturers and industry organizations that issue requirements related to new developments in the industry. Spinco is aware of such issues as the new refrigerants, compatibility of desiccants, and system contamination concerns.

Over the years, Spinco has slowly broadened its capacity without sacrificing quality. In 1994, Spinco acquired a brass refrigerant component manufacturing company. Then it expanded its facility to 50,000sqft so that all of its manufacturing could be accommodated under one roof. Additional capital equipment and personnel have since been added so that Spinco is able to meet the needs of large and small OEMs for machined component parts as well as tubular products.

"We’re prepared for growth," Straubing says. "We have a great facility. We’re state-of-the-art. And our veteran crew is seasoned to do what we need them to do. So we feel we’re ready to say to just about anybody, ‘Why don’t you let us do that?’ "

Spinco Metal Products

Douglas Clark is a freelance writer based in the Los Angeles area.

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