Today’s solution doesn’t necessarily meet the needs of tomorrow. In this situation, Spiros had been providing compression springs in conjunction with an overseas supplier to a customer in the United States. Eventually, the customer went to an automated assembly process and continued to use springs from both sources. However, the springs proved to be difficult to untangle at the newly increased automated speed.
Spiros was contacted and made aware of the problem and was asked to see if something could be done to eliminate the tangling problem. Spiros clearly understood that an alternate spring would still need to meet all of the performance parameters including a very limited amount of space to fit the application.
A number of redesigned springs were considered before settling on a solution that Spiros felt would solve the issue. The new part consisted of dead coils in the center so that the springs would stay separated in a vibratory bowl feeder. A sample order of 5,000 springs was shipped to the customer for testing and proved to solve the problem which eliminated a great deal of process downtime.
Spiros was awarded the contract to produce millions of these newly designed compression springs that continue to feed exceptionally well. Not only was Spiros able to answer the call to solve the problem, but there was no performance loss in either life expectancy or functionality.
At Spiros, problem solving is simply part of being a value-added supplier.
