Our customers know that when they’re in a bind and need parts quickly, they can count on IBT. This wouldn’t be possible, though, without the many upstanding manufacturing partnerships we’ve worked hard to build and nurture over the years.

We’ve discovered that the key to any successful partnership lies in a commitment to dedication on both ends and we see this portrayed day-in and day-out in the field between our team and the experts over at Depco Pump Company.

We were reminded of the value that a dedicated partnership can offer, both to us and our customers, when an IBT sugar manufacturing customer needed a new pump ASAP and one of our team members reached out to Depco for assistance.

It’s All About OPTIONS

It was business as usual on a Thursday afternoon when Steve Navarro, Branch Manager of our El Paso, TX branch sent an email to Depco Sanitary Product Manager, David Farrer looking for a quote on a centrifugal pump.

After selecting his preferred seal type on a pump for the specific application, he quoted Navarro 2-3 weeks. “We have over 60 pump lines to choose from so that gives us a lot of options to meet the specific application criteria,” Farrer said.

It’s a supplier’s extensive product knowledge of all those “options” that allows them to work with us in order to best meet our customers’ needs━and quickly.

In this case, our customer’s downtime was accumulating by the minute, so when Navarro responded “looking for something off the shelf,” or more readily-available, Farrer re-evaluated the options in order to prioritize both the timeline and cost.

Another significant, influencing factor in our ability to turn an order quickly without settling on quality, is our suppliers’ initiative to understand a problem well. “[Farrer] reverse-engineered the problem, which allowed him to then engineer a solution based on the options he had available,” Navarro said, “and with a little in-house modification, he was able to knock the 2-3 week original quoted lead time down to 1 day.”

By Friday, the following day, Farrer had: quoted a new pump, received a purchase order, made necessary modifications, and begun coordinating shipping arrangements. Depco was committed to seeing the order all the way through, so when the trucking company wanted to charge a large chunk of change to deliver the pump on Saturday, they examined alternative options and got the pump delivered on Monday at a fraction of the cost, saving our customer extensive freight costs

A Devotion to Service

What made it possible for Depco to help us turn a 2-3 week lead time into 1 day? Farrer says it’s Depco’s $7 million investment in inventory. “Our inventory is [IBT’s] inventory. Your customers benefit from the ability to same-day-ship most items from our inventory.”

At the end of the day, though, it comes down to the individuals in the field and their devotion to service. “We know how many items your company sources and [Depco’s] niche is to be ready to serve IBT,” says Farrer, “When you call or email us, we will be ready with an answer and a quick turnaround time…We want to be IBT’s ‘easy button’ for pumps and pump parts.”

With over 3,000 manufacturing partners, servicing hundreds of industries and selling millions of product SKUs, we highly esteem any business relationship that operates on the kind of family-owned, service-oriented values that IBT was founded on. “[Depco] almost always puts IBT at the front of the line,” Navarro said, “and that doesn’t happen.”

So when customers invest in IBT, they’re investing in quality━Quality names in manufacturing. Quality partnerships. Quality people.

About IBT’s Fluid Power Group

IBT offers a comprehensive array of fluid power products and services. Since 2001, our Fluid Power team has helped customers with everything from ordering individual replacement parts—to designing and commissioning complete systems. Want to know more? Our highly-experienced Fluid Power Specialists are standing by to help increase the productivity of your operations through fluid power applications. Contact IBT Industrial Solutions’ Business Group Director of Fluid Power, Brent Hanson, or give us a call at 913-677-3151, today!