I once worked for a company that manufactured natural gas meters, including both residential and commercial/large volume meters. One of the leading natural gas meter manufacturers had discontinued a certain type of natural gas meter, along with its parts. The discontinuation of the parts, especially one certain diaphragm part, threatened millions of dollars worth of projected future work. Finding an alternative to this discontinued diaphragm was imperative. Although the company had known of the problem for years, and had purchased the last 5 or so years worth of diaphragms from the manufacturer, time was running out to get to work on finding an alternative, and the company had made no traction towards that vital goal.
After hearing of the problem for the first time, I quickly realized that further business analysis was required. After some exploratory research, I conducted a business case and presented my findings to the executive team. The results were staggering. If we didn’t secure new diaphragms for the meters within the next year, millions of dollars that were currently being collected would be lost. The president and owner of the company both quickly approved the project moving forward. After gaining approval, further research and planning were necessary. The project would require researching rubber manufacturing companies that could produce the diaphragms, capturing quality thresholds from our customers, performing the accelerated and variable environment testing, change management to capture and rebaseline any changing requirements, as well as the implementation of the new diaphragms into production.
After creating project management plans and communication plans (which included stakeholder analysis), I reached out to over 45 rubber manufacturing companies, acquired samples of their work, and obtained bids. Simultaneously, I worked with a mechanical engineer at our company to capture the requirements for the new diaphragm, as well as CAD diagrams to give to our new rubber manufacturers. I also had to send samples of the OEM diaphragm out to a material analysis company for reverse engineering so I could find out the exact material composition of the OEM part. While this was going on, I had to capture quality thresholds from the customers via the sales team. Many customers had purchased this particular style of meter and would need to make sure that these replacement parts met the specs of their state certification boards. Each customer had their own requirements that had to be met for the replacement part to pass inspection and to be approved.
The diaphragm replacement project ended up being a huge success which netted the company a projected $2.2 million in continued revenues over the next 10 years. These diaphragms will be used for even more years to come after this as well!