Case Study #1: Stainless Steel Valves
Problem: A customer’s engineering department redesigned a line of stainless steel valves using metric hardware. Our quote came out much higher than our customer’s purchasing representative expected, especially because we had fabricated and machined similar valves for them in the past.
Goal: Our customer wanted to be able to offer their customers an improved design but it had to be within a marketable price.
Result: Our project manager identified new metric hardware in the customer’s design as one of the most expensive changes. The design called for non-standard metric hardware made of a Monel alloy, which had to be custom-made. Then, he worked with the customer on alternative standard hardware of the same Monel material which resulted in a savings of $6,000 per valve. Because the customer had six valves on order, this change saved our customer $36,000 but did not compromise safety or quality.
Case Study #2: Drawing Error
Problem: The Rose Corporation builds custom steel equipment and weldments from customer drawings and specifications. Sometimes, these drawings contain errors that could cost our customers plenty in rework and missed delivery or installation dates.
Goal: Not only do we strive to do a consistently excellent job building what our customers have designed, but we also want to understand their products so we can use our combined years of experience to assist them in improving on their drawings and designs whenever possible.
Result: Recently, we received an order from one of our larger customers for copper transfer switches. While clarifying some of the information on the job, our project manager identified a conflict in the drawings. One set showed holes in the material, the other did not. The piece should not have had holes and our project manager was able to call our supplier and correct the order before it cost our customer money and time.
Case Study #3: Crane Rails for the building of the Freedom Tower at The World Trade Center
Problem: Our customer needed high priority work done to fixtures that were to be used in the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site. They had trouble finding vendors with machines large enough to handle the work who were also capable of getting the work out in a timely manner.
Goal: Going onto an overtime schedule was an important part of meeting our customer’s needs but they needed more than that to meet fast delivery requirements.
Result: We worked out a system of machining the fixtures two at a time saving 40% of the time it would normally have taken to process the same number of pieces. Meeting our initial deadline, we were awarded several more of the same fixtures to complete. It was a successful job that helped the Freedom Tower at the WTC get built faster.
