vertical slurry pump gland seal water pressure

Sepro Mixing & Pumping: Quality Control

Quality Control Processes

When we get a sales order in, our salespeople finalize the details of either the pump or the agitator that we’re going to be supplying for the customer. Once that’s finalized, I get the information from them and we generate a build sheet and an ITP together. An ITP is an inspection test plan. From there, the build sheet and ITP is passed off to different departments, such as engineering, so we can produce the manufacturing drawings, and to the shop for production, so we can start coordinating how we can inspect the parts that come in, how we can start assembling them, how to test them, and then how to package them and get them ready for our customer.

The ITPs are pretty much like a step-by-step process that we all follow that helps us make sure everything’s ticked off and we don’t miss any boxes. It helps to optimize our workflow. So that’s from the start to the end. And then when it gets here, we test and assemble and ship out to our customers.

Sepro Lean Manufacturing Team and the Sepro Quality Control Committee

It’s been great having these two teams work together hand-in-hand. We’ve been able to optimize the steps in our workflow, starting on how drawings are produced in our engineering department to our manufacturing processes, which has helped us eliminate any waste, which also helps us keep our costs down and keep our lead times low to keep the quality up for our customers. Being able to optimize some of our products has been key and it really shows in our final products.

Meeting Deadlines and Quality Standards

On the pumps side, we’ve come up with PHAC’s, which are ‘Pump Housings And Accessories’. These are pretty much all our pumps minus the hose and the gear motor in one package and when the order comes in we pull the package off the shelf with the gear motor that we ordered and put the pumps together for our customer. Having these pre-packaged has helped us to inspect all the parts in there, test-fit them, and make sure we have everything before an order even comes in so we know we can meet these deadlines.

It’s helped us lower our delivery times so instead of 5 to 6 weeks, we can do 2 to 3 weeks. Because we have all the parts on our shelf, we know there’s no quality issues and everything fits together. the PHAC’s are in an inventory that we keep a healthy amount of on our shelves here and in Montreal, so we’re able to service East coast and West coast easily.

As for the agitators, I credit the relationships that we built with our vendors locally to keep our quality up and keep the lead times low. I’ve been able to jump in and inspect at the different phases. Whether it’s manufacturing locally or rubber lining here, we can go inspect, test-fit, all before it shows up to Sepro so we can eliminate any possible problems that might arise at the end of the process. We catch them in the middle or beginning phases which helps us not only with the timeline, but also brings the cost down and any headaches that we deal with here in the shop.

We’ve also implemented a lean mentality to our agitators. On the smaller sizes, we’ve standardized our impeller sizes and we’ve been able to keep a healthy amount of inventory on our shelves. So when an order does come in for a small agitator, that’s only a 2-3 week lead time because we have everything on the shelf already. We just go pick it and wait for the gear motor to come in from our gear motor vendor and assembly it in the shop.

Sepro’s Lean Manufacturing Program

We’ve been pretty lucky to have a lean team here, especially a lean team that consists of individuals from the different departments in Sepro. It’s really helped us pinpoint any areas of improvement and continuous improvement within the company. The thinking-out-of-the-box mentality that we all have on the team has helped us become more efficient overall. Just to give you an example, in the past week we’ve initiated a kaizen to improve the quality inspections of our couplings – removable couplings for agitators as well as our pedestals.

We’ve just got the ball rolling on this one so we’re not too deep into it yet. It’s about 2 to 3 weeks’ time to jump into the kaizen and come up with solutions. But stuff like that is what’s really helped us keep our quality up and the morale of everyone up and it just makes being at Sepro a fun environment to be in with great products that are being pushed out the door.

Kaizen Definition

Kaizen is, in simple terms, a study of a process, so we look from the beginning to the end of a process, break it down into steps, and try to come up with any possible areas that have room for improvement. We kind of ask our, what we call our Five Why’s, so why five times to get to the root cause of the problem. And then we come up with the possible solutions that we can implement to it to fix these issues that we have, or, not even issues, [but] steps that can be done a little bit better just to give us that better product at the end of the day, or that better process at the end of the day.