It Is The Little Things That Matter

Sir Dave Brailsford from Team Sky once said:

“The whole principle of marginal gains came from the idea that if you broke down everything that could impact on a cycling performance — absolutely everything you could think of — and then you improved everything little thing by 1%, when you clump it all together, you’re going to get quite a significant increase in performance. So we set about looking at everything we could.”

British Cycling, under the guidance of Sir Dave Brailsford, have been incredibly successful. But what’s the link with welding?

The concept is just as applicable in fabrication – small changes all add up. For example, when welding with a premium MAXX® weld process gas from Air Products welding speeds increase up to 17% meaning more output per man hour. Likewise, weld quality improves via increased penetration and a smoother finish reducing the requirement for costly re-working.

Even when we take it to the next level of granularity the benefits are still incremental – reduced spatter from welding costly stainless steel with INOMAXX® gas significantly cuts both the time and cost of post-weld cleaning. The compact 300 bar Integra® cylinder also has a whole host of cost benefits from the most basic elimination of the need to purchase a regulator to the time saved searching for spanners and keys thanks to the quick connector. If your operation is at the other end of the size scale then the telemetry in the Air Products liquid tanks combined with the constant pressure re-fill process means you reduce the need to shut down production. Finally if all of this is combined with the Air Products GASTRAKSM service to drive down gas wastage then this all adds up to a huge boost to your bottom line.