 Specialist distributors: Keeping systems running smoothly
July 01st 2010
Sean Fairest, divisional manager Industrial Air, Atlas Copco, looks at the vital role that specialist distributors play in making sure your system runs smoothly.
Sometimes, moving forward doesn’t mean progress it just means going further away from an original point. Take the term ‘engineer’ for example: once marketing people discovered that the general public associated such positive words as ‘expert’, ‘security’ and ‘valuable’ with anything associated with an engineer, then the word began to be mis-appropriated. No longer did ‘engineer’ mean someone who had studied engineering and had an engineering qualification, it could now be related to virtually any occupation, to the extent where someone serving drinks in a fast food restaurant might become a ‘beverage dispensing engineer’. The same process, it could be argued, has happened to the term ‘specialist compressed air distributor’.
Just as the various engineering accreditation bodies have put in place a concerted effort to reclaim the word engineer, by explaining the difference between engineers and technicians for example, so by looking at what a compressed air distributor offers can we begin this differentiation. Most readers will be au fait with their nearest distributor or air house and like the fact that they have local knowledge of the region and that they are ‘big enough to cope but small enough to care’. But, just pause for a moment and ask the questions: Does my distributor have factory trained engineers that are comfortable with the very latest technology? Can I be sure that I am being offered genuine replacement parts? Also, has my distributor the ability to offer specialist services that include air treatment specification, on-site energy audits and ultrasonic air leakage analytical procedures?
Specialist compressed air distributors are, almost without exception, in partnership with one of the large compressed air equipment manufacturers, although there is a huge difference in what this actually means in terms of the support that they receive from that manufacturer. One of the major benefits of this support is that if a product is updated then the specialist distributor will be notified and the engineers trained to perform the modification. If the customer has a service contract with the distributor then this modification will be implemented at the next opportunity. Non-specialists would not be aware of the product update however and, just as we have see in the automotive industry, this can lead to unreliable performance for want of a simple adjustment.
More worrying though are the examples of where lack of specialist knowledge has led to enormous expense on behalf of the end user in terms of maintenance and repair costs and production downtime. Richard Hewitt of Anglian Compressors, an authorised distributor of Atlas Copco Compressors, recalls an example: “A manufacturing company in the Cambridgeshire area moved its fixed price preventative maintenance contract to another company which was offering to do the same for half the price. Over a period of 18 months they experienced a recurring fault on their system which they spent £17,000 on repairing. In addition to this capital outlay they also lost six days of production and it wasn’t until they lost patience and called us back in that the fault was diagnosed as a relatively straightforward problem that an experienced and fully trained person would have rectified immediately”. An expensive lesson learned.
So, just as with the term ‘engineer’ there is more to being a ‘specialist compressed air distributor’ than meets the eye and hopefully, if you have access to a good air house, then the staff will know your systems, know your equipment (perhaps they installed it originally) and know your people. More articles from Atlas Copco Ltd: | 
