Process Evaluation: What It Is & How It
Can Change Your Business for the Better
Process Evaluation: What It Is & How It Can Change Your Business for the Better
It’s difficult to sell equipment that’s not considered a necessity. No one wants to be associated with something that could fail. Particularly when it’s non-mainstream, potentially disruptive technology.
That’s why we created a general path for evaluation. We’re always evolving, but many of our tools have stood the test of time. Here are some of our staples from the past 30+ years.
Talking Tour
The concept of a talking tour is simple. On your scheduled call, you’ll describe your dispensing process to one of our experts. (Be prepared to discuss plant temperature conditions, routing between coating supply and point of dispense, and quality issues.) This call effectively gives us a tour of your process, minus the excess time and travel.
Our team will ask pointed questions to draw out details you may not have considered, diving deeper into quality defects, causes of rework and scrap, material and solvent usage, and other concerns specific to your process.
When we’re done, one of our experts will provide you with a free, individually-tailored report for your application (including suggestions and action items). The report will also offer a unique perspective on the often overlooked and misunderstood the impact of temperature on the dispensing process.
Temperature Tour
The Temperature Tour is more involved than the Talking Tour and calls for more collaboration between our teams. We visit your site and tour your process using a comprehensive checklist and a thermal imaging camera. The result: a solution-oriented report informed by decades of experience that addresses your unique concerns.
All we need from you is a tour of your dispensing process. Starting at material storage, you can take us all the way through product completion. We want you to point out whatever seems to give you the most trouble.
We’re thorough. That means we ask a lot of questions, take a lot of pictures, and write a lot of notes. Remember: we’re observing your entire dispensing process through the prism of temperature and evaluating how it might be disrupting your cost and quality targets.
At the end of the tour, you can expect a comprehensive report from us that details our evaluation of your process, including how routine temperature fluctuations may be contributing to quality defects and excess coating & solvent usage.
Viscosity View
By measuring viscosity changes and correlating them to quality and material usage data, we can quantify how much changes in viscosity could be costing you. Armed with this knowledge, you can take steps to minimize the impact of those changes.
All you need to do is point us to the coating that’s giving you the most trouble. We place one viscosity sensor at the material source and another sensor close to the point of dispense. Then, we track and record quality and material usage data.
We collect timestamped viscosity data at both locations for an agreed upon period - usually two weeks or more. Once that’s done, we prepare a viscosity variation report and work with you to correlate to quality and material usage.
Following that collaboration, we use graphs and written explanations to give you a clear picture of the viscosity variations and how they relate to quality and material usage.
We only dive into Viscosity View when we’re both confident that a) there’s a problem worth solving and b) we may be able to solve it.
There is an associated cost, but it’s generally applied to a solution purchase.
Demo Decision
Once you feel confident that we can help you, it’s time for the Demo Decision. If our demonstration unit performs as planned, we can move forward. If it doesn’t, we’ll remove the unit (and hope that we both learned something!).
All you need to do is contact us to schedule the installation of a demonstration unit. Plan for a short period of downtime and make sure a maintenance person is available to help with installation. All we need is a few hours for training.
Our service technician will fully commission the equipment and train your team. We will offer suggestions for optimizing performance and are happy to answer any questions you may have.
You will receive full use of the equipment to determine if it works for your process and your team. We recommend using the equipment for at least two weeks so you can experiment with different materials and varying conditions.
Our success rate is 90% when we mutually agree that a demonstration unit makes sense.
As with the Viscosity View, there is an associated cost with the Demo Decision, but it is generally applied to the purchase of a solution.
How We Look At It
We believe that the only thing worse than providing a solution with no value is spending too much time figuring it out.
The bottom line is simple: our system will work for your process or it won’t. If it doesn’t, that’s okay! With most of our customers, we find a solution that works for both of us, and we learn something in the process. Win-win.