Rick Ferdon

Valin processes many critical year-end orders for clients.  During a stretch in late December of 2016, Rick Ferdon from the Dublin, CA location handled two orders with great care, using his unique skills.

On the first order, Rick processed an expedited order from an energy customer to ensure one segment of the water plant was operating before the year-end. This was due to operational and budget expenditure purposes. The customer paid an expedite fee to ensure shipment by a specified date, but the supplier’s critical machining tool went down pushing the order back for an undetermined time. Rick pursued the shipment with the supplier’s production manager and negotiated shipment from the factory leaving time enough to assemble and ship from Valin to the customer site for installation before the crews went home for the holiday. Upon assembly of the control valve, it was learned that the coupling from a 3rd party vendor was incorrectly machined to a metric dimension instead of the needed imperial dimension. Thus, the valve stem could not be connected to the actuator output shaft. Mid-afternoon on Tuesday, Rick machined the correct coupling and the valve was assembled, tested, and shipped.  I received the email confirming freight pick up from Rick at 7:30 PM, on Christmas week. The valve arrived the next day for the crew to install and the customer was very satisfied unaware of the obstacles that were overcome.

The second case involved an order accepted from a gas turbo-expander customer on a high- speed operating cryogenic trip valve. This was the first high-speed closure valve order that Valin had assembled and tested internally. The customer agreed to accept liquidated damages (a fee charged each day that the order misses the delivery date) with their client.  These cryogenic valves are the longest lead time piece of equipment on the customer’s skid assembly, thus making the scheduling of this component a critical path item. Several weeks after the order was entered, it was discovered that Valin’s order to the supplier was for the wrong valve style. The supplier and Valin worked together to close the delivery gap. Rick and purchasing expedited the valve every week and then every day to ensure delivery to Valin. As was mentioned in the first example, the same supplier’s machinery breakdown delayed production. The team worked with the supplier’s production manager to meet delivery, while Rick coordinated the assembly and high-speed testing of the valve. The valve was successfully delivered and the customer averted any consequential damages because Rick Ferdon was at the controls.

Rick faced several challenges with the two orders in addition to covering for several employees in the Process Control group that were on vacation. Rick operated in a sacrificial manner – machining, assembling and packaging on both orders.