To serve and protect : OPW Fueling Components
Published : May 2006
OPW Fueling Components has been an industry leader for over 100 years. Ruari McCallion talked with some of the company’s executives about meeting contemporary challenges
Whenever you go to a gas station to fill up your tank, chances are you’ll be using the products of OPW Fueling Components. The most visible item is the thing you hold in your hand, the nozzle, but there’s a lot more going on, and a lot of it has to do with your safety.
“Our products fall into two categories: dispensing and environmental,” said Dave Hall, business unit manager for environmental products. “Dispensing products are the nozzles and breakaways: the visible, above-ground components. Environmental products are below ground, and they’re no less vital. They include sumps, breakaways, hoses, and shut-off valves, and they’re there to protect the environment.”
They protect people, too. The reason gasoline doesn’t shoot out all over a gas station forecourt if someone drives off with the nozzle still attached is because of OPW breakaways. A filling station bursting into flames is entertaining in a movie, but it’s no laughing matter if a car crashes into and destroys a pump in front of a supermarket.
“A woman in the Midwest recently ran into a pump unit and seriously damaged it,” said Greg Pearson, senior business unit manager. “A firefighter held up one of our under-pump safety valves on TV after the accident and said the woman owed her life to it.” Safety valves are built to operate in a fail-safe manner: if, for any reason, a breakaway doesn’t break off and stop the flow, then it’s designed to melt in place. About the only major pieces of equipment OPW doesn’t make for the forecourt are the pump and the tank. The pump and tank businesses are very competitive, and OPW prefers to stay focused on its own business, in which it has a lot of experience and significant market share.
Pretty much everything in a gas station’s fuel system is made by OPW. When a tanker makes a delivery, the driver will take the lid (made by OPW) off the spill container, with its OPW cap. Delivery is controlled and shut off by an OPW ball float or overfill prevention valve, and the two-, three-, or four-way extractor valves are theirs also.
The filling station market is changing as fuel costs rise in public awareness. Diesel cars are already familiar sights, and there’s a new fuel emerging as well. It’s less polluting than either gas or diesel and offers consumption that challenges both. CNG (compressed natural gas), or LPG (liquefied petroleum gas), has presented OPW with a whole new set of challenges. In order to keep it in a liquefied state, it has to be dispensed and stored under pressure, and that pressure includes the tank in the car. So the new breed of nozzle has to form a tight seal and be able to withstand some pretty high forces.
“We test CNG nozzles at 5,200 pounds per square inch, and we’re going up to 7,000 psi,” said Pearson. Those are pressures that could cause concern in the ordinary traveling public. “We always test our nozzles at higher pressures than the field sees. We subject them to extreme conditions, too. They’re tested in water, behind bulletproof glass.” Pressure testing will go even further, up to 20,000 psi, and OPW is investing in the capacity to do it. In order to withstand the testing—never mind operate in the field—CNG nozzles must be made of different materials, which means different processes also.
“The metal has to be of a very high quality standard,” said Linda Renner, environmental safety and health manager. “The nozzle itself is a high-pressure vessel, and our vendors all have to be appropriately certified. Ordinary gas nozzles have aluminum spouts and bodies; CNG nozzles are made of stainless steel and high-quality brass. The concerns are both safety and operations. We can’t afford to have anything operate under those high-pressure conditions without making safety a top priority. If something goes wrong, those things can go off like a rocket.” So it’s important to ensure that nothing does go wrong, and OPW places a very strong emphasis on testing. One hundred percent of the nozzles and breakaways are tested before they leave the plant.
The CNG nozzle business is a fairly new market, but it’s now starting to show encouraging growth. At the present time, bus fleets are the major users, in areas like Los Angeles, where pollution is particularly bad or regulations particularly tight.
OPW has been innovating in its marketplace ever since it was founded, back in 1892, as Ohio Pattern Works. Based in Cincinnati, it was the first pattern shop in the city with its own foundry, and the first to make both wood and metal patterns. It soon began making control valves for the growing petroleum business, and within 30 years the company was established as a leading supplier of nozzles, valves, and couplings. It changed its name to OPW Corporation in 1948 and became part of the Dover Corporation (later Dover Resources) in 1961.
Since 1992 OPW has been divided into three operating groups, with the largest, OPW Fueling Components, becoming a separate operating company within Dover Resources. It was the logical way to ensure continued high standards of service to its operating sectors. Its leadership role has been recognized by the Petroleum Equipment Institute (PEI), which named it “Manufacturer of the Year” five times. It has also twice been nominated to the PEI Circle of Excellence, in 1995 and 1998. The company isn’t just a leader in the US; it has a global presence and is regarded as an industry leader across the world.
“Our corporate offices and principal manufacturing plant is in Cincinnati. We also have production facilities in Tennessee, Chicago, and California; internationally in the Czech Republic, France, Italy, China, and Brazil; and we’ll be starting production in India soon,” said Pearson. Although OPW doesn’t actually make everything involved with a gas station, it offers customers everything they need to open a full service point. “We call it ‘gas station in a box.’ It has everything required to set it up; we’re a one-stop shop for all gas station requirements.” Some markets in which it now has operations have cost advantages, in labor especially. Innovations like “gas station in a box” help maintain competitiveness by innovating with added value, but that can’t be the end of the story. The size and spread of the gas station market has inevitably attracted attention.
“Low-cost companies have tried to enter the market, but it isn’t that easy,” said Hall. “Quality is an issue: the breakaway valves and other safety products have to work 100 percent of the time. We have a design team in-house, so we’re able to get new products and design improvements out fast. We’re also able to put our own teams out in the field, while potential competitors may not be.” Business improvements play a vital role, also.
“Dave Ropp and Craig McNeill, our senior corporate officers, saw the need for improvement; we were being beaten on quality. We were sent to Motorola to learn six sigma,” said Pearson. “We were, to be honest, struggling to do it on our own. We needed direction, and five years ago Tom Ciepichal came on board to give us exactly that.” Hall was originally quality manager and still does a lot with six sigma and floor improvements. Lean techniques help to reduce costs by eliminating waste and, through feedback, to improve design for manufacture. All plants are benchmarked to ensure they follow the same procedures, and improvements are quickly shared. Improvements have been across the board.
“Once we effectively introduced six sigma, lean, and standardized work,” said Hall, “we uncovered issues that had been getting in our way for years. Our guys are very good at fixing things, repairing faults they took for granted. They’d been repairing parts supplied to us for 30 years, for example.” The quality team has addressed the issue with suppliers, which has both improved the components and cut out an expensive step in the process. Communications ensures the shop floor workers understand that the company is seeking to expand its business, not put them out of a job.
One of OPW’s most successful cost-savings measures has been to outsource the accounting and expense management of shipping to IntraVex. OPW has implemented an efficient payment process, improved its carrier agreements and credit terms, and established an information and reporting portal that allows for analytics on virtually any spend-related transportation.
“Our ROI with IntraVex is five times in year one,” said Erik Shelton, director, order fulfillment. “We can account for our logistics spend down to the penny, and we know what type of performance our customers are getting on delivery. IntraVex lets us focus on what we do best.”
“We’re looking to increase production by 10 percent this year, and that’s something that gets tougher. We’ve done the easy stuff now,” said Pearson. “We have incentive programs for our staff, and we use outside consultants to help us with lean initiatives and kaizen. What we’re interested in is delivering quality goods, any way we can.”