PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Helping Customers Increase Efficiency and Reduce Lead Time

BACKGROUND:

Sanitaire (a Xylem brand) is a world-renowned provider of innovative water treatment solutions for municipal and industrial wastewater treatment applications.  The company’s manufacturing team needed a controls designer and manufacturing company to partner with in its effort to review and refine their system controls.  The goal was to achieve a higher degree of standardization while retaining the flexibility needed to integrate with legacy components.

SOLUTION:

At the Industrial Controls Company, we are committed to bringing added value to every customer project.   Partnering with Sanitaire’s engineers, the Industrial Controls Company worked relentlessly toward the goal of standardizing the company’s control systems.  The teams, working in tandem, developed a standardized system for completely customized controls to suit distinct municipal or industrial applications, along with detailed documentation to enhance the serviceability of these systems.

OUTCOME:

Our design standardization helped Sanitaire increase efficiency and reduce lead-time and cost.

We used high fault combination ratings on Sanitaire’s key componentry to raise the short circuit current rating from 10ka to 25ka on power circuits at no additional cost. We utilized limited energy circuits on non-UL listed componentry in order to maintain the UL listing of the system, eliminating the need to submit those components for further testing.  This reduced the project timeline by an entire year.

Our team also developed a PLC-based testing software program that allowed us to perform 100% functional testing in our facilities prior to field installation, dramatically reducing time lost to errors in the field.

Vendor and component standardization allowed for cost improvements and significant reductions in procurement lead times. Material lead times went from 3 weeks to next day and increased volumes provided better pricing.

We also applied standardization to the panel and enclosure layouts, thereby requiring fewer changes and dramatically accelerating documentation. Standardized templates enabled us to reduce assembly labor and reduced the amount of time needed to generate modified enclosure designs.