As an engineer of manufacturing processes and designer of semiconductor production facilities, my aim is maximizing efficiency without sacrificing safety. It would be fair to say, in fact, that my first priority is always safety. It is my job to guarantee that I account for any possible glitch in our systems and integrate safety functionality into plant design and manufacturing processes to reduce the risk of damage to equipment, the environment, and people – both workers in the clean room and the larger community as well.
Automatic gas cabinets have surely made the working environment safer than it would be with entirely human operators because their rate of error is so much lower. But until I met with an account rep at an equipment engineering company, this increased safety often came at such a high cost that building new plants or processes to support technology often required financial acrobatics tantamount to red tape; each new project required a large budget and high pro-forma ROI that wasn’t helped by the high cost of new gas cabinets. Thankfully, equipment company was able to help on both safety and efficiency fronts by consulting on the design and servicing of our gas delivery equipment. By sourcing devalued equipment and restoring it to new specs with its team of repair and refurbishing specialists, the company has been able to consistently provide much of the equipment we need to support safety, efficiency, and innovation at a fraction of the cost of buying new. And because of their extended experience with industrial gas applications, they are able to suggest money-saving equipment that streamlines production in ways that I might not think of.
My equipment company’s know-how of automatic gas delivery has made my job simpler and made product safer and more lucrative. Whereas we used to employ some standalone cylinder cabinets in conjunction with a manual gas panel for some of our mass flow controlled welding processes, the cabinets that were advocated for our most recent process – automatic ones with on-board computers to control the panel and automatically purge spent tanks of volatile gasses – actually saved us money when the price of labor from operating the old cylinder cabinets is factored in. (Though they have helped find the optimal panels for our manual applications.)
Planning production plants and processes to be safe is difficult enough – never mind having to engineer them to be profitable. The folks at this company are always there for my team and me from conception through implementation. They are the leader in my book when it comes to both monetary value and knowledge – a welcome colleague on the job if you ask me.
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