Product category:
Pure water: UV and Membrane systems
News Release from: Elga Process Water | Subject: Resin stocks
Edited by the Processingtalk Editorial
Team on 05 July 2007
Elga Process Water solves emergency
problems
Elga Process Water has concluded a strategic purchasing agreement with the suppliers of ion exchange resins, and now carry a large stock "Just-in-case" there are customer emergency problems
The "just in time" (JIT) concept has spread throughout industry as a means of reducing stock inventories and warehousing costs It works well for planned manufacturing, but what happens in an emergency? This is a problem that has been troubling John Pethers, National Service Director at Elga Process Water
This article was originally published on Processingtalk on 17 Dec 2002 at 8.00am (UK)
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"We build ion exchange plant to order, and supply replacement ion exchange resin to customers as part of planned maintenance contracts.
We purchase ion exchange resin for these jobs on a JIT basis and it works well," he says, "but we also have customers who need replacement resin in an emergency.
Unless we hold stocks to cover this, our customers are faced with a potential delay of several weeks".
If the resin in an ion exchange plant fails or is lost, the result is downtime for the customer with loss of production until new resin can be obtained - often several weeks - and if the customer is a power station the costs can be dramatic.
John can recount 6 projects in 5 months that have been delayed as a result of poor resin availability.
"We recently won an order to carry out a resin change for a small plant - it required 1250 litres of resin but at the time we had only 750 litres in stock.
The twelve week delivery period for the remaining resin meant the customer had to delay the job for 3 months and suffer the production outage".
John can also see the other side of the problem.
"The resin suppliers also work on JIT: they don't want to have large, expensive stocks of product sitting in the warehouse waiting for someone to buy them", he says, "But that's small comfort to the production manager with a failed plant".
To solve the problem Elga Process Water has concluded an agreement with its resin suppliers to hold the largest UK stock of ion exchange resins for water softeners, deionisers, dealkalisers and organic scavengers of any engineering company.
The resins are ready to be called-off as needed for immediate delivery.
"It is a massive investment", says John, "but having resin in stock allows us to be pro-active in the media replacement market.
It means that we can have engineers and resin on the road straight away.
As far as our customers are concerned, it's peace of mind because they know that we have resins in stock to meet their emergencies - it's not so much just-in-time as just-in-case.".
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