THE BUSINESS OF VISCOSITY BLOG

Someone recently asked me which applications are the most challenging for us when implementing viscosity and temperature control systems. When I thought about it for a second, it came to me. Dealing with viscosity and temperature variation is easy. We have been doing it for over thirty years. Installing, implementing and optimizing our systems is very straightforward. Making the decision on whether you should install one of our systems is the challenging part.

It was in the not too distant past that the 30 minutes or less pizza delivery option changed the way we would think about our dinner choices. Fast forward to 2020 and the way that we buy everything has changed the entire retail landscape. Convenience and cost savings have all but eliminated face to face customer interaction. Is the retail model influencing the way we think about making our purchases for our industrial processes?

If you work in the robotics world, hardly a day goes by that you don’t hear something about “Cobots”.  It’s one of the hot topics in the field right now…

We recently did a survey of Industrial Coaters on LinkedIn to determine the pressures they were experiencing on their business. The first question dealt with the common defects they experience. We got plenty of the “usual suspects” like orange peel and run & sag, but amongst the most interesting and unexpected responses were:

The “new normal” is a phrase that I have been hearing and saying a lot lately. When the Covid-19 virus started circulating, I must admit that I could not fathom the impact that it would have and how each part of our lives would be affected. Now that we are in it and have accepted our present working conditions, it has become quite clear that a lot of things will not go back to “normal”. So, what does that mean exactly?

Your Line is on Hold, Now What? 

So much of our online content, (blogs, articles, videos, etc.), is geared around productivity improvements, quality defects and other “cost” related elements of manufacturing. All good stuff, but maybe a little blind to the essential goal of growing your business. Whether it’s expanding business with your current customers or acquiring new customers, much of what we talk about can help.

I had a marketing person ask me a few years ago what it was that we did at Saint Clair Systems. When I described what we did, he had one question for me. After a brief pause, he asked, “So what?” Initially, I thought he was just being rude but then I realized that he was trying to get me to clarify why what we do is important and who it is important to. I know that in a lot of our blogs we discuss the importance of quality, consistency and repeatability but as I read some of them, I find myself asking the same question; so what? This blog is an example of a so what.

We had an interesting thing happen a couple of years ago. A major Tier 1 Automotive Supplier, (we’ll refer to as T1), contacted us to see if we could help. Their customer, a top selling luxury car manufacturer, was raising the specifications on their paint finish and T1 was being asked to match. T1 told us that they could meet the new specifications but not consistently. They were hoping we could help. Fortunately, we had a champion at the T1 plant that was familiar with us and with work we had done in other finishing operations.