Ask an expert
Question:
Expanding pipe seems tricky. How do you ensure a reliable expansion?

Answer:
Today’s perception of expanding pipe might seem as mysterious as alchemy was during the Dark Ages; but there is no magic in our processes or materials. While some unseen dynamics occur, the methods and validation of products and practices ensures a consistently reliable product. Akin to forgetting something at home because your morning routine was thrown off, we learned long ago that uncontrolled variation equals defects; not just in products and components, but also in our practices and processes.

Enventure relies on quality practices and consistent processes to ensure success. Consistency occurs during every phase of the job – from design to supplier fulfillment and from customer interaction to post-job follow-up. Jobs may vary from each other, but the uniformity of practices remains the common denominator.

Because the actual expansion occurs downhole, we don’t have the luxury of visually seeing what’s happening. That means we must ensure consistent inputs which yield highly predictable outcomes. Yet, we maintain high reliability by ensuring consistent inputs which yield highly predictable outcomes. Through systematic design reviews and testing we see how components will fit together, perform in real-world environments, predict expansion pressures and define limitations.

However, the foremost method in ensuring reliable results is the interaction with our customers. It is critical we understand the intended operating environment. This information must be standardized and formatted for internal evaluation and assessment. Additionally, customer feedback is critical to improving our processes. We work with a wide spectrum of customers in a variety of environments; regardless, we assess every job the same way and again garner the information systemically to ensure that improvement are fed back into the processes.

Supplier performance is also critical because our requirements are extremely stringent. Our suppliers and contractors are selected through a process which requires preliminary evaluation, onsite auditing and performance monitoring. Just as partnership with our customers is a key to our success, partnership with our suppliers ensures efficient and consistent results.

Our inspection methods exploit one of our most valuable assets: our staff. Enventure’s personnel have a broad range of exposure in other industries such as aerospace, automotive, and military; all of which require repeated consistency. While we use traditional methods of inspection throughout our processes, we integrate our experience with thorough planning based on historical experience to determine at what frequency and with what methods checks should occur.

Although alchemy’s main objective of transforming common metals or materials into gold – its inconsistency proved its demise. Enventure has already settled on being the most consistent and reliable provider of solid expandable technology – and we’re taking that to the next level every day.

Miguel Valencia
 

Miguel (Mike) Valencia,Sr. Quality Assurance Specialist, has nearly 20 years of experience in quality assurance and process improvement. He has worked within the automotive and manufacturing industries and is trained in Lean Manufacturing, is Six Sigma Green Belt certified and ISO certified. He joined Enventure in 2006 as part of a team to bring the Company into ISO compliance. He now works directly with Enventure’s testing, engineering, and operations departments to ensure quality processes and procedures.

Want to learn more?
Contact Enventure’s experts at: 281.552.2200 or need.info@EnventureGT.com

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