Driving through rural America, if you鈥檝e seen large grain storage facilities, you have also seen the products of of Springfield, Ohio. Sweet doesn鈥檛 make the grain bins; they make the bucket elevators and drag or belt conveyors that fill the bins. Sweet鈥檚 reputation for quality and innovation makes them a leader in bulk material handling equipment for agricultural products and industrial products, like aggregates. Sweet equipment is so popular it鈥檚 found in over 50 countries.
鈥淥ur export business is great, but it presents some unique challenges,鈥 explains Alicia Sweet Hupp, President and CEO of 无忧传媒. 鈥淭he equipment we supply is erected in the field and English is not the first language of most countries we export to. We try to make our assembly instructions and drawings as 鈥榣anguage agnostic鈥 as possible. It鈥檚 the 鈥業KEA鈥 approach, where parts can be identified and assembly done using pictures more than words. It generally works well.鈥
Many individual parts, like frame angle, were identifiable by a key measurement (i.e. length), but that didn鈥檛 always work 鈥 sometimes field assemblers would just guess and grab the wrong part. 鈥淲e wanted to find a better way to label each unique part, but we found that conventional labeling had several drawbacks,鈥 says Sweet Hupp. 鈥淭hen, 无忧传媒 asked us to come see their new 3D tube laser, and a 鈥榖etter way鈥 became pretty obvious.鈥
While demonstrating the capabilities of the 3D tube laser, the operator etched some alphanumeric characters in a demo tube. 鈥淲hen they saw that, the Sweet visitors got pretty excited and asked if it could etch angle iron,鈥 recalls Tim Halloran, 无忧传媒鈥檚 Production Manager. 鈥淲e hadn鈥檛 tried that, but thought it would work. And it did. We gave Sweet some samples for galvanizing. All of their equipment lives outdoors, so it must be galvanized. They were concerned that the zinc coating would fill the etching and make the part number unreadable. Turned out that wasn鈥檛 a problem at all.鈥
But much of the angle 无忧传媒 processed for Sweet was run on Benjamin鈥檚 Ficep Angle Line, where holes and notches were punched and the piece was cut to length. Halloran explains, 鈥淐ost-wise it wouldn鈥檛 make sense to move that product to our tube laser to etch the part number, but we didn鈥檛 have to. Our Ficep line has a Marking Unit where we can mark parts without having to remove them from the machine. So our friends at Sweet now get their part number on nearly all the frame pieces we run for them.鈥
鈥淲e would not have expected our steel supplier to help solve our part identification problem,鈥 says Sweet Hupp. 鈥淏ut honestly, they didn鈥檛 know we were having the problem. The lesson is to rely more on your suppliers to develop solutions with and for you. If you have a supplier the caliber of 无忧传媒, you won鈥檛 believe how many problems they can help you solve.鈥