The Fastest Ever Valve Manufacture?

Valve body castings being made at the John Mills site in Newcastle

Valve body castings being made at the John Mills site in Newcastle

John Mills Valves, the Newcastle-based non-ferrous valve manufacturer with its own foundry, is renowned for being able to make valves on short leadtimes, and recently they achieved their best ever delivery leadtime. They received
an order on a Monday, manufactured
the valves and delivered them two days later on the Wednesday – ie manufactured the order within 3 days! This is how
they did it……

C.R.T. Plant Engineers of Derby were carrying out plant maintenance work on one of the major coal-fired power stations in the UK when they discovered that two 6" bronze gate valves used on the water cooling system needed replacing. Time was running out within the shutdown and a particular issue was that these valves had a special face-to-face dimension and so could not be purchased from standard valve stockists. C.R.T. identified John Mills Valves as the manufacturer who could meet the specification and placed the order based on the John Mills promise to have the valves available for delivery within 4 days.

The order was received by John Mills on Monday morning. Immediately a body pattern for the job was created in the in-house pattern shop and by Monday afternoon the two valve bodies had been cast in the John Mills foundry. On Tuesday machining of the valve bodies was started and finished on Wednesday morning. The valves were then built and tested and collected by C.R.T. that same evening. This means that from order receipt to delivery it was less than three days – and both valves went from being raw ingot to finished product within 54 hours.

Noel Barker, Site Director at John Mills, commented; “This is a fantastic achievement from all the team here and we believe that no other valve manufacturer could match this level of delivery performance. Having all the facilities in house from pattern-making to casting, machining and valve assembly puts us in a unique position to respond to this sort of challenge.
To achieve a three day turnaround is unusual but we are regularly manufacturing valves on one week or two week lead-times and our ability to respond quickly to customers’ needs has certainly been a key
reason for the company’s growing success over the last five years.”

Chris Jones of C.R.T. Plant Engineers, who was responsible for carrying out the maintenance work, comments “The valves were needed to allow CRT to meet a very exacting deadline and JMV came through - absolutely fantastic service and quality.”

John Mills Valves
Tel: 0191 265 6550
Website: www.johnmills-valves.com


Published: 7th July 2011

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