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Press Releases & Editorials

October 2007

Power is work divided by time

Power is work divided by timeThe design engineers, technicians and workers from Merkel Xpress. Specialise in turning potential disasters into success stories.

What happens when a half-finished ship is sitting in the dry dock or a nearly completed oil rig part is sitting in the assembly hall and suddenly a part is missing that is small in comparison but indispensable, for example a seal in a special design form?

Call the right number
What happens is clear: first people start to lose their cool and then someone's immediately on the phone, stress levels start to go up and those involved start to get nervous. Deadlines are in danger of being missed. The customer threatens contractual penalties. Hold on! When the telephone and data lines get going in the right direction and the developers and design engineers call the right numbers, this disaster scenario suddenly becomes a success story like the following one. The just call the Merkel Xpress number.

The impossible becomes possible
They call the Hatlapa company, a ship's chandler from the Schleswig-Holstein region of Uetersen, north of Hamburg. It's 7:40pm. They need two seals for the customer in Italy by 2 pm the next day. The originals were constructed in China, a brand of specific dimension. They can't be procured in Europe. And certainly not by tomorrow. Or just maybe they can? They have to be produced overnight. A joke? Absolutely not. Quite the contrary: Merkel Xpress is serious. Just like the physical definition, the Merkel Xpress team defines power simply as work divided by time. This definition is put into live practice at Merkel Xpress. As you've probably guessed, the customer order information has already long gone to the night shift. There, the team leader searches out the sealing geometry from over 140,000 drawings stored in the database. With a computer and a well organised database, a match is found.

Hey Presto!
Now a reasonably fitting sealing geometry has to be adapted to the existing drawing. Fortunately, the computer geometry can be rotated so that the situation is quickly under control. But on the other hand, the computer is not everything. The competency and experience of the engineers and technicians at Merkel Xpress are what makes the system work on a day to day basis. Power is work divided by time. While you are reading this, the night shift has already produced the seals and called a taxi that will take the parts to Schwalmstadt to Hamburg where they will be handed over to the assembly fitter of the Italian customer, so that they are at the ship by 2 pm in Italy where they can be installed. Hey Presto!

END

Further Information
For further information relating to any of the above products, please contact Tony Snowdon on 0113 252 1061 or e-mail tonys@ftltech.co.uk


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