A ride to the future

#1/2009
Text: Juris Kaza

To become more productive you need advanced technical solutions and services and a reliable partner. Latvian manufacturer Valpro has found all this working with AGA.

When Valpro, an ex-Soviet manufacturer based in Latvia, was privatised in the late 1990s, it still used welding methods from earlier times – handwork by skilled welders, some semi-automated equipment and the cheapest shielding gas available, carbon dioxide.

“During the Soviet era, we were kept in a barrel,” says Guntis Briedis, the current director of quality control at Valpro and technical director in the late 1990s. “After privatisation we realised we were working very uneconomically and unproductively.

“We met AGA at a trade exhibition, and the company offered us not only equipment, but also technical solutions and their engineering and laboratory services,” Briedis recalls.

AGA was no newcomer to Latvia. The company first established a presence there in 1926, eight years after the nation declared independence in 1918.

AGA advised and consulted Valpro on the purchase of new automated welding equipment from a number of European manufacturers. In addition AGA implemented the use of its argon-based MISON® shielding gas to replace carbon dioxide and installed the automated gas supply management system SECCURA® to prevent loss and ensure timely replenishment.

“We had a big production peak in October 2008 and used a lot of shielding gas,” Briedis says. “Even before we checked the gas supply we got a call from AGA headquarters in Stockholm asking what was happening. That’s how the service works.”

However, he emphasis, the biggest gains from the processes implemented by AGA 10 years ago were in a switch from soldering to welding brass parts onto extinguisher tanks.

“When we soldered by hand, this was a major bottleneck,” Briedis explains. “AGA advised us on purchasing and installing an automated brass welding machine. Now we have as much, if not more, production capacity than we need, so production peaks aren’t a problem.

“Earlier brass soldering was slow work by a few very skilled employees,” he says. “Now we can train a welding machine operator to run the process in a few days. The machine has to be programmed by an expert, to be sure, but the daily work involves pushing some buttons and seeing that everything happens as it should.”

The use of modern equipment and AGA’s shielding gas has also improved productivity and weld quality in all of Valpro’s extinguisher and extinguisher shell production, Briedis says. Valpro’s sales in 2000, when most of the new equipment and processes had come online, jumped to 4.4 million Latvian lat from 2.5 million LVL the previous year. The boost of sales has since continued at a steady pace and in 2007, Valpro had sales of 7.29 million LVL, up 17 percent from 2006.