The partnership between a Bottling Company and all three Ward Divisions
Most of our customers know that Ward designs and fabricates pressure vessels, tanks, and shell & tube heat exchangers in our Vessel & Exchanger division. It’s how we came to be and our oldest division. Some customers have invited our Field Service Group division on-site to perform specialty welding and machining work during turnarounds or emergency shutdowns. One Ward division that may not be familiar to as many is Equipment Enterprises. For 5 decades, Equipment Enterprises has supported the beverage bottling company sector by way of designing and fabricating carbon and sand filter vessel equipment, then providing the service of filter media changeout when called on by those customers.
The majority of the work we do for our customers stays within a single division. However, sometimes the Vessel & Exchanger and Field Services divisions have an opportunity to work together and those are definitely special projects where we build new equipment in one of our shops and our Equipment Enterprises group sets the vessels up with the filter media and maintains that over time. Every once and a while, a customer has an opportunity to work with three Ward divisions at the same time: Vessel & Exchanger to fabricate new shop equipment, Field Service Group to install the vessels and modify any piping or perform other on-site specialty welding or machining, then Equipment Enterprises to install the filter media and ensure the customer water supply is up to the stringent quality standards required in the bottling industry.
Recently, Ward was contracted by one of the world’s largest food multinational food, snack, and beverage corporations to build new sand and carbon filter vessels, remove the old vessels, install the new units, re-route multiple piping loops, passivate all the new piping and vessels in place, then install the filter media and prepare the customer system for use.
The project went well and we finished up ahead of time and under budget – across all three divisions. The customer was wildly pleased with the quality of the new equipment and how simple Ward made the entire process. One project, perfectly executed by one vendor partner made for success for all involved!