Estevan– When you change the oil on your truck, you need some necessities, oil, a filter and maybe some rags while you’re at it. Similarly, when a battery or gas plant has its periodic maintenance done, they need certain, standard parts, too.
And just as you’d walk into an auto parts store and say I need a filter for such-and-such model pickup, maintenance crews walk into Estevan Meter with similar orders. The difference is the gaskets are a lot larger.
Estevan Meter keeps records on every facility it services, categorized by land location. This is especially useful when a facility changes hands over the years. Not sure what that treater will need? They can look it up for you.
“We’ve kept records for almost all the vessels in southeast Saskatchewan for almost 20 years,” Doug Martens, president, noted.
A company simply calls in with their land description, and the inside sales people, like Rory Badley, take it from there.
“I just did one,” he said on Sept. 11. “Usually they’ll call in and give us a location. With our 2010 software, we started putting in all locations and turnaround instead of filling filing cabinets.”
“They gave me the location. We had not serviced this location before. He let me know the vessel name. I looked it up from other companies and found four similar models.”
Common models of treaters, for instance, he knows well. Badley said, “They don’t change much at all. Once you get your gaskets sorted out it’s in the extras. There’s certain cleaning supplies, anodes, gasket material.
“For dump repair kits, some customers fix them themselves.”
A trolley with freshly painted pressure safety valves awaits pickup. Repair of such items is one of their bread and butter services, according to Badley.
Estevan Meter keeps a calendar of scheduled turnarounds, allowing them time to prepare and pre-pick turnaround packages. But not everything is done that far in advance. “One call this morning, they were sending someone in this afternoon. We have to cut a custom gasket,” he said.
There’s a rack of gasket templates they keep for just such occurrences.
Workers go through the warehouse, picking items like anodes from the racks. It all goes into a bag, marked with the company and location, for pickup.
The administration staff keep a running order record of what’s been picked up. Crews return unused items for restocking. Files are updated on what is used, i.e. what type of anode was required, to be better prepared for next time.
