The demand for turnkey electrical solutions from OEM and electrical installers (looking to reduce their assembly times) is increasing. This gives manufactures of enclosures the opportunity to offer a value added service by carrying out customisation and assembly in-house.
Chris Lloyd, Managing Director at Spelsberg UK, explains in a statement the reasons for the growth in demand of industrial enclosure assembly services:
“When a customer selects an industrial enclosure supplier, the quality of the enclosure itself is obviously crucial. It’s got to be robust enough to meet demands and have the functionality required for the application, including customisation. However, increasingly the market requires not just the enclosure, but an assembly service that can provide a complete – or partially complete – assembly. Assembly could range from a DIN rail and terminals, right through to fitting and wiring a controller, providing the customer with a plug and play solution.
At Spelsberg, we’ve seen growing demand from customers year-on-year for our assembly service. Customers increasingly have constraints on time and strive for ever greater efficiency. One reason is that businesses are more streamlined than ever, with more compact yet higher skilled workforces. As a result, our customers’ engineering roles are focussed on specialised tasks which require a high level of training. This means that they’re looking to outsource tasks which deviate the focus from what their skilled staff are trained to do, and this means outsourcing the assembly of components within industrial enclosures.
At the same time, Spelsberg employees are highly skilled in the planning and implementation of enclosure assembly, which means that in most cases we can do it faster than the customer can. For example, a recent project required assembly of two large GRP units bolted back-to-back, involving installation of telescopic handles, backplates and other customer-specified components. The customer’s timescales were extremely tight to fulfil their project demands and we completed assembly within a week, which was faster than any other estimates the customer received. For this reason, combining assembly with enclosure procurement will ultimately increase the customer’s speed of project completion.
Combined with reducing customer resources and project time, outsourced assembly is also likely to mean reduced project cost. Spelsberg is set up to quickly and efficiently assemble enclosures on a daily basis. For this reason, in house assembly will nearly always be more expensive than Spelsberg’s cost-competitive assembly process.
An added benefit of relying on a manufacturers assembly service, rather than outsourcing to a third party, is that it puts accountability for the effective and timely completion of the whole project onto a single supplier. This makes project management far more efficient as well as reducing costs.
When it comes to assembly itself, standard requirements include installation of components such as terminals, DIN rails and cable glands. Membrane keypads and wiring are also a frequent request. An example of specific assembly at Spelsberg could include a digital thermostat unit, where the customer provides us with the digital controller which we install, including wiring, fitting of the terminals and DIN rail. Essentially, we can fulfil virtually any assembly requirement.
Working in one-off or small quantities up to batches, we work closely with the customer and their design to create a tailor-made solution, and we can also provide planning assistance. This way, we can bring our extensive experience of working across numerous previous projects to the benefit of the customer by advising them on the most efficient or effective assembly layouts when required.
Assembly also extends to modules, which tend to be used on large-scale control systems, a requirement for example by the rail industry with Spelsberg GTI enclosures, as well as baggage handling systems.
The quality of the Spelsberg enclosure and our customised service is crucial and it’s a primary reason why our customers choose Spelsberg.”
