Solutions Session: Save HOURS With This One Simple Gas Connector Upgrade

Speaker A: Foreign. Podcast with me, George Raderman and me, Marie Williams. Brought to you by Reliably Routerman. Bringing you industry news and trends plus insightful conversations with industry leaders. Let's get to today's show.

Speaker B: I'm Jason Clifford. I've been with fastest for 11 years now. My current role is a business unit manager for the compressed gas business unit. At Fastest. Before Fastest I was with, with Testcom. So I've been in the industry of you know, high pressure valves and regulators and connectors for quite a while now. A couple decades.

Speaker A: So um, my name is Matthew Esee. I am the global business development manager at FastTest, uh, for the gas business. I've been with Fastest since uh, I think 2022. Before that I worked at Air Gas for 10 years uh, as a manager at the main facility up here in Minnesota in Roseville. And then I also ran a facility down in South Florida. So I've got good number of years of experience in the compressed gas industry over on customer side of it and also now on the vendor side, quick

Speaker B: overview of fast test. We make connectors for all the popular CGA valve standards. You know the 580s, 540s, 870s, um, and we're getting into some more of the global standards as we kind of branch out a little bit as well and even some fittings. We're trying to become a supply for more of the system and not just the connector. So we've got a swivel fitting that we've uh, recently released and we're trying to, trying to branch out a little bit.

Speaker A: What Jason said they're fast and they're very easy to use. Traditional twist on or clamp on threaded ones are, they're manual labor. They take time to connect and disconnect. So that's, that's a big differentiator. Ours is single action, one to two seconds and that's it. I've been a part of time studies and it varies a little bit but on average it takes our connector, we'll say three. You know it's probably close to one to two seconds to make a connection but it's uh, it would average two seconds to make a connection with our connector versus a manual connection. Takes you know, five to seven seconds to make a connection. So speaking in terms of seconds, that's very short amount of time. But when you're making many, many connections on a single rack or manifold, those seconds add up in a day and then those seconds continue to add up in a week, a month and a year. And if you can imagine, especially in a busy facility, those seconds translate to significant hours saved uh, in a business, in a gas filling operation. So it's, it's pretty dramatic.

Speaker B: This is a fastest quick connector. It's a bale handle operated so you pull back on the bale and you attach to the cylinder valve and just drop the bale over it and you're done. So it's really just a 1 second to 2 second operation. Now the twist on, obviously you've got your cylinder valve and you've got 7, 8 threads, 78 rotations that you have to manually twist with your hand to get that twist on connector connected. So you're going to spend some time doing that. It's going to hurt your wrists after a while. It takes a toll not only with time spent connecting, but takes a toll on your body.

Speaker A: So also from an ergonomic standpoint, our uh, quick connect, one of the main benefits besides time savings is also it reduces the repetitive motion injuries which is very, very common. And it's uh, in the compressed gas industry those repetitive motion injuries don't always occur but when they do they're very, very costly for the operation. And so that's one of the crazy benef.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean that can happen at the customer's pace. If they want to switch out their whole plants, just say they've got you know, 10 different manifolds that they want to upgrade from twist ons to quick connectors. We can do that all in one um, fell swoop there. Another option is to just do it as the customer has budget for. If they want to do one manifold at a time. That is also completely reasonable and completely possible. And that is actually what we see most of happening currently. So and as far as any difficulties, um, making the switch from a twist on to a quick connect, um, it's really very easy. Um, you unthread your twist on connector and um, thread in our quick connector. It's a male quarter inch MPT fitting just like the twist on. But yeah, it's very easy. There is a learning curve, right. If you haven't used these before, um, it's a very short learning curve we think. Um, there's a few things you got to keep in mind as you're using these quick connectors. But typically we'll see the guys, they'll use them for you know, four or five fill cycles and then they'll have the hang of it. So within a day they'll know what they're doing and pretty much be off and running.

Speaker A: We have tracked A, ah, number of success stories with our products, but one of the big ones that I like to use, one of our larger customers did an actual time study on 48 connections in their facility. And using, uh, normal twist on connectors, it took them an hour to complete an entire fill cycle. And out of that 60 minutes took them 20 minutes to twist on and disconnect. So 10 minutes to make 48 connections by twisting on and then another 10 minutes to go around and unscrew all the connections and remove them. After installing our connectors, they reduced that time down to five minutes. You know, so two and a half minutes to go through and make 48 connections and then two and a half minutes to go and remove all those connections at the end of the fill cycle, which saved them 15 minutes per fill cycle. They were traditionally doing five fill cycles a day. So with those 15 minutes of savings, they were able to add another fill cycle to that shift, which when you're talking terms of revenue and output in a facility, that's huge. Now this is a very, very big, very busy facility that had multiple shifts running. So it was a no brainer. Those connectors are going to pay for themselves in less than a year because they're able to continually put out cylinders like that. But the time savings, even if you're only doing two or three fills a day and that's all you need to do, the time savings add up dramatically and especially at the end of the year and you start looking at those time savings, it's, it's, it's astounding. So I would say especially for the independents, which is kind of primarily where the distributors, I know there's a lot of business through the distributors like Radterman, Radiman. I know it's really advantageous for the customer who could rather me because you guys have our, uh, products in stock on the shelf. You also have replacement O rings, which is a major part of the lifespan of the connectors. Replacing those O rings, you have that stuff in stock readily available. You have developed relationships with those customers. So the process is very, very streamlined. I know from my experience working at Air Gas that when we needed stuff not only from the connector world, but for anything, it was like, just call Radiman, just email the Radiman rep. They're going to have it quick. The transaction was super fast, super easy. Sometimes you could do it online with your account. So the benefits, there's quite a few benefits there with working with Radman because of the way you've developed your business and how you manage your customer flow. So yeah, there's some great benefits.

Speaker B: Kind of echoing what Matt said, you guys are always there and it's more than just connectors. You've got a lot of things available for our customers and you've been a great partner with us. So, uh, continue to look forward to drive that more in the future.

Speaker A: Thanks for watching. Stay up to date with the latest news in the gas and welding industry by clicking on the subscribe button and check out one of our other videos to learn more. Find out more about Reliably radterman, uh, @rmiorder.com.