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The complicated assembly used to require negotiating with many parts suppliers, in-house tube cutting with brazing, plus a building and storage capacity that stole space from other important needs. So after years of tolerating the process, which made inventory management as complex as air traffic control at a major airport, Thermal Product Solutions (TPS; New Columbia, PA) decided it was time for a change.

Now the Pennsylvania manufacturer of temperature test chambers enjoys one-stop shopping. They no longer sweat sub-assembly deadlines or concern themselves with tracking the availability of parts. And they're enjoying huge savings from lower inventory costs.

"Instead of building ahead of time, and eating up man-hours so that we always had inventory on hand, we just place the order and get finished sub-assembly just-in-time to build the chamber," says Rick Powell, a TPS project manager for environmental cooling. "In the past we might have to buy twenty components just to have them sitting here when we needed them. Now, if we need five pre-built assemblies, that's all we order. And if we get an uptick in business, we order more."

The test chambers Powell oversees are used in virtually every industry you can imagine. The temperature benchtop and floor model test chambers are suited for use in electronic, military, and pharmaceutical quality assurance and reliability testing, as well as research testing and production processes. They are designed to meet the rigorous standards of today's research labs. And each chamber requires a cascade refrigeration system, a complicated 100-piece maze of copper tubing, soldered joints and brass machined parts.

"It's the meat and potatoes of our chamber. These are complex. They're not just two or three little tubing bends. This is a proprietary design that took thirty years to develop." For that reason, Powell said it wasn't easy finding a company to take on his firm's sub-assembly burden. Several companies wanted nothing to do with the complicated procedure. Others bid too high to be acceptable. Fortunately, the solution to the problem was closer to home than they realized.

TPS had been purchasing copper tubing from Spinco Metal Products (Newark, NY). The upstate New York firm has been supplying the air-conditioning and refrigeration industry with specialized tubular and machined component parts and assemblies since 1966.

More importantly, over the years Spinco built a state-of-the-art facility that includes the kind of specialized tooling equipment that performs far beyond what TPS and other firms can do. For example, Spinco's expert capabilities meant they could build the TPS components with fewer soldered joints, which reduced the potential for leaks. In short, they could take away TPS's pain and deliver a superior product.

"We took them a sub-assembly product and said we'd like them to build it," remarks Powell. "They said, 'We can do it as you've designed it, or we can improve it.' They've improved it greatly, rather than just repeat what we were doing. We don't form tubing. We buy it on a roll and cut it, but they can actually mill that fitting and mold it into a pipe. They reduced our soldered joints. If we took them something with fifteen fittings, those fittings could equal 35 joints. They could do the same with only eight joints, because they don't use an elbow piece, they can bend the tubing."

TPS now purchases about ten different sub-assemblies from Spinco, which is fine with the firm's owner and president, Bob Straubing. "We've been doing this kind of value-added work for the last five years. Before then we were selling a lot of tubing and small lots of parts to our clients," explains Straubing. "When we discovered TPS was getting component parts from at least three different places and putting it all together themselves, we said, 'Why don't you let us do that?' It's what we want to do for everyone who has a complicated assembly."

Powell details how Spinco works with the vendors that TPS had once used to supply fittings and valves. When a part needed for assembly is no longer available, Spinco quickly proffers replacement suggestions. Also, TPS no longer has to stock parts purchased from vendors – that's Spinco's responsibility. So is the air-traffic-control-like nightmare of tracking incoming parts.