Third party repairs cause internal damage

The Challenge

The operator of a coal-fired power plant in the US has had a long relationship with IMI CCI. However, due to market pressures they had developed a site strategy to reduce the number of vendors and had started to use a third party for repairs of all valves in the plant.

During one of their regular outage-related activities, two IMI CCI valves were opened and found to have trim damage. The customer sent the trim for a repair evaluation from the third party. On discovering this information during a regular sales visit and plant walk down, the IMI CCI team reached out to key stake holders in the plant to set up a strategy to recover the lost repair business.

The Solution

Over the next few weeks, the IMI CCI team engaged with the customer to walk through the engineering features and benefits of genuine OEM parts versus third party replicators. Detailed engineering specifications of the trim components were discussed to help the customer understand the manufacturing process and coating requirements to ensure that the valve trim is able to deliver the required performance. As the customer understood the probability and impact of a third party repaired component, they agreed to recall the trims sent to a third party for repair and send them to IMI CCI.

The IMI CCI repair team supported the customer with a complete end-to-end solution, with inspection, repairs and shipping to the repair centre and back to meet the customer’s outage timing.