Standards for conveyer design

by Ing. Gustavo Sosa, CEO of Sosa Ingenieria, USA

In our Latin American market, we suffer a lot because of the lack of standards. Even the piping isn’t uniform. It depends on whether the supplier is Argentinian, Brazilian or Chinese. This means the sizes of all the fittings are different, even some of the conveyors.

As professionals, one of our main responsibilities is the creation and promotion of technical standards that will lead us to economies in the maintenance during the whole lifecycle of all the facilities and even on new projects.
 

Let’s say we are expanding our facility, installing a new belt conveyor, and suddenly we realise it is five metres too short to operate properly. We call our supplier and he says he is overbooked and the delivery time is 60 days.

What do we do? Stop the works for two months? Even if you send the workers to Unemployment Insurance, you have to dismantle the camp and set it up again in two months. Besides, there is a lost income for the two months that the facility won’t be yet operating at the new capacity.

Call our local steel workshop and tell them to copy all the structural pieces while we get the rollers somewhere else? It is very likely the workshop will take more time than they promise and the rollers have to be imported from China, Europe, or the US, and that will take at least 45 days for the sea freight.

Everything sounds absurd and there seems to be no solution. But there could be one, if manufacturers adopted common standards. In that case, the piece that one manufacturer doesn’t have could be supplied by another one.

As manufacturers, at first view it might seem one is losing business, because you are lifting exit barriers for your clients. But you are also actually lifting the entrance barriers for new clients. It will even allow us to outsource production if we have too many orders and don’t have enough capacity.

You don’t even need to create these standards from zero. You may adopt others, created by international organisations.

Read more HERE.

 

The Global Miller
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