Back in May, we were approached by an existing customer, Protec Energy, with an unusual enquiry…
The need was for seven ‘compressors with duty and standby’ – effectively our duplex compressor station – something we do regularly but not often. The project is part of the Lynemouth Power Station Biomass Conversion, fire protection covering the biomass handling from the Port of Tyne to the rail loading station for onward shipment to Lynemouth; basically a “ship to rail” process consisting of conveyors/transfer towers and storage silos within the Port of Tyne.
After discussing the benefits of these units (automatic load-sharing between the compressors, fast fill time from empty, manual backup switching in case of failure, high output on single phase power, space-saving design etc), unfortunately, once we got onto the costs there were the usual ‘budget issues’.
To cut a long story short, and after plenty of to-ing and fro-ing, we settled on something very close to the original proposal (with a design tweak to accommodate power supply restrictions), with a lead time of around two months to fit around our existing commitments. However, that lead time wasn’t suitable for the customer because it was now past the middle of June, and the fit-out needed to be finished by July. Re-think needed!
Our main problem at that time was that only one person at SEP had ever completed the wiring panels, which are pretty complex to say the least, so we had a bottleneck. It was agreed that we’d play ‘Generation Game’ with Gary leading Tom and Kate so we could now do three control panels at once. After this, Tom (an ex-BT engineer) found it easy to rip through the rest. At the same time, Dave was being trained by Rob on the mechanical build and Kate was supporting Gary with the last parts of the panel while Milan kept the rest of the business going in the background.
What started out as a perfectly reasonable eight-week timeline was reduced to just three!
Another example of customers setting us seemingly unrealistic challenges… and us achieving them!
A big ‘Thank You’ from Rob to Protec for placing their trust in us, and to the entire SEP team who worked together and pulled out all the stops to keep our customers happy.
If you have a request, no matter how unusual or short your turnaround, please get in touch. Whilst we cannot guarantee to meet every request, we will do our utmost to work with you to complete your order on time and to budget. Call us on 0161 428 1180 for a chat or email your requirements to info@saleengineering.co.uk.
Learn more about Duplex Compressor Stations here.