News & Events At IPH or the hydraulic and pneumatic cylinder industry

Corona Advisory

Whats happening is sad and we really hope people do not panic and stay safe and take necessary precautions. In lieu of this we have prepared an advisory from what little we know. You may download it and stick it in your premises as a safe guard measure if not already done so.

IPH Corona-Virus-Advisory Download

Government Issued Advisory Download

The file contains the advisory in both English and Hindi. IPH wishes everyone a long and healthy future.

Note – IPH provides this advisory only as information and is not a recommendation. Please consult your doctor for your specific case.

Annual Training In Fire Drill

In an industry, safety is a primary non negotiable concern and IPH CO is very serious about fire safety.

To this effect we have been having fire drills regularly to train our employees from time to time.

We have been installing fire safety measures for many decades now but the training sessions were begun only about five years ago.

Worker Health

We had conducted a workshop for basic health tips (solution to common ailments) at our IPH Thane unit recently. Ayurveda indeed does have many easy to make and use items readily available in our homes. Our employees have surely taken some value out of it.

Difference Between Mobile Hydraulics Versus Industrial Hydraulics

Mr Rory McLaren is a founder Director with Fluid Power Training Institute, Inc Utah. He writes vociferously and interesting articles on what plagues hydraulics industry in general. His self stated goal is

My goal is to bring about the change in fluid power education and safety that is so desperately needed in America.

In an article on linkedin he has contended that there is really no difference between Mobile & Industrial Hydraulics as far as training is concerned.

Divisions in Mobile & Industrial Hydraulics is primarily a marketing concept. People like to segment their target market so that they may focus their supply chain and their operations toward a particular type of customer.

This has nothing to do with expertise but generally we find that people at worker level in manufacturers of Industrial Hydraulics are more technically tuned than manufacturers of mobile. This might be the case because of the manufacturing cycle.

In Industrial Hydraulics, the variety and scope of work involved is exponentially larger than in mobile hydraulics. Many problems arise at the manufacturing level as each job might be different from the next. In many cases it might be a iterating on the spot in the supply chain.

But technically Mr Rory McLaren is right, there can’t be any difference between Mobile & Industrial Hydraulics as the concepts on which they are based are the same.

Hydraulic Cylinders Vs Electric Rod Actuators

Hydraulic cylinders, known for their high force at an affordable cost, have been widely used in factory automation equipment and other special automation equipment for decades. Hydraulics are rugged, relatively simple to deploy, and provide a low cost per unit of force.

In recent years, electric rod actuators (cylinders) have become more flexible, precise, and reliable with increasingly larger force capacities. These advancements have created an ongoing debate over hydraulic cylinders and electric actuators—specifically, which one of them offers the best overall approach for an assortment of motion-control applications.

IPH Thane Workshop Gets Face lift.

Having a good hydraulic cylinder workshop shows good housekeeping. Good housekeeping is a sign of a well managed company. A well managed company makes better hydraulic cylinders.

Things are NEVER so SIMPLE but NOR are they too COMPLEX.

IPH Floor 1

IPH (Thane) has been manufacturing hydraulic and pneumatic cylinders for about four decades now. Our workshop frankly never quite reflected the expertise that we have. We had been meaning to do something about this for quite sometime.

IPH Thane has been thinking of upgrading our shop for a while. So we began by repairing the flooring, this with some real nice flooring concrete with a special mix to harden it.

Supervisor

The economic downturn took us down along with it as most businesses but we did the most out of the down turn. We took the slightly higher time we had and rebuilt our shop. Work is not done yet and there is always something more to do. But least we got the in-house part right!

A dose of freshly coated paint and we think its pretty nice to look at. We will not be arrogant and say we are a world class facility.. just yet. But we are getting there.

Man of the Moment is Mr Vijay Achrekar who actually lead the change and has been ably assisted by his crew.

Tired after a long day

All this without a break in our schedule. He has managed things beautifully along with some good help from the entire team including Rajesh Nair (Customer Relationship Manager) who ensured all customers were taken care of.

Large Honed Pneumatic Pipes

Jayashree Gawde who brought things in on time. Shaji who supported Jayashree with Quality, Prabhakar who was very decisive in final testing and ensuring all material test certificates were in place before dispatch.

Testing Of Large Pneumatic Cylinder

Assembly team who worked doubly hard to get things done on schedule.

Overall it has been a satisfying experience and we will go further to improve upon this slowly but surely.

Godrej Case Study

We discuss the build up and manufacturing of the massive cylinder we made at Thane which could lift more than 1340 tonnes!!

This cylinder is a High Pressure Hydraulic Cylinder custom made for Godrej Tooling Division. The purpose of the cylinder was to open the insides of Prithvi Missile. Since the load required to open the shell from the inside is pretty high, we had to design something out of the normal.

The cylinder is of 650mm bore, works at a pressure of 450 kg/cm2 and can lift more than 1340 tons. Its one of a kind and we are very proud that we built it despite the challenges. Read on …

Hydraulic Cylinders which run for 20 years

We received an enquiry yesterday, he has a machine running an IPH Thane hydraulic cylinder for the past twenty years without a problem.

Thats quality!

Special Purpose Machines SPM

IPH has 40 years of experience in field of hydraulic and pneumatic cylinders. We have been doing this for far longer than almost all companies in this field. Our design strength and experience have helped us build a reputation for custom designs and built hydraulic and pneumatic cylinders over the years.

We also cater to a huge number of SPM manufacturers through out India. Our ability to manufacture almost any type of hydraulic and pneumatic cylinder over past 40 years make us perfect for such partnerships.

If you have any such need then do get in touch with us, we will be happy to help 🙂

Hydraulic Cylinders And Google Apps

The title “Hydraulic Cylinders And Google Apps” is not misleading. The connection is elaborated below.

First of all we apologise to all our customers who must have had their mails bounce from our servers.

The Problem

No Mail

Mail from customers was bouncing off from servers. Apparently our hosting server couldn’t handle the amount of communication that IPH did.

Inefficient Email Setup

On a more closer look we realised that about 20% of the emails were needless transfer and forward from one account to another.

For e.g. we have a “accountsperson”@iphmain.onpressidium.com and another accounts@iphmain.onpressidium.com . Mail from accounts@iphmain.onpressidium.com will be forwarded to “accountsperson”@iphmain.onpressidium.com. Thus inflating the mailbox.

The same mail was also autoforwarded to other email boxes for reference and backup. So now we have three copies of the same email thus increasing it threefold.

SPAM

~30% was pure SPAM. Everyone received SPAM which was just hogging our mail server resources and storage.

In one of our support chat sessions our current web host asked us to upgrade to a higher grade VPS.

VPS would mean more resources will be allocated to us but it would also mean we managing the mail servers on our own. IPH is in the business of manufacturing Hydraulic & Pneumatic Cylinders, not managing mail servers. We should concentrate on solving customer problems instead of managing hardware/software issues.

It does not remove inefficiencies of our current system and;
It does not solve our SPAM problem

Over the year IPH has transformed its operations to include more IT into our daily operations. This meant more emails, more transactions on internet, more creation of excel sheets, word documents etc etc. Complete transition from a legacy system to custom built ERP solution for our daily operations. We had to find a way to manage all this without too much load on our own servers. While the custom built application had to run in house we could easily transition email and excel sheets outside.

The Solution

google-apps-cloud

Clean inefficiencies in mail routing and Outsource all email and other related IT communication to a third party vendor. Let them do the heavy lifting so that we can concentrate on our customers.

Reliable communication is one of the primary mainstays of business because you want your business to be always available. If you cannot solve your communication problem there is really no way you will ever be able to server customers better.

Enter Google Apps

Google Apps had been used in our company for about two years now. The employees were conversant with the system and had already been working on it. We still had the odd attachment email but internally most of the items were simply shared through google docs.

They helped us integrate our communication better plus the all important load was taken from our shoulders. Google aso has a great AntiSPAM controls plus a huge mailbox. We could now chat & share internally. And we do all this with minimal mail server management saving us tons of effort.

Overall we faced two days of downtime. We have since then communicated to most of our customers regarding the problem and they have been more than sympathetic. Thank you for understanding.

5S Initiative At Indian Pneumatic And Hydraulic

We have been involved in Lean activities since the beginning. Simply put this helps us in improving the workspace and reducing burden among our employees.

For the uninitiated, following is an extract from Wikipedia.

Lean manufacturing, lean enterprise, or lean production, often simply, “Lean,” is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, “value” is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for.

Essentially, lean is centered on preserving value with less work. Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System (TPS) (hence the term Toyotism is also prevalent) and identified as “Lean” only in the 1990s.^[1]^[2] TPS is renowned for its focus on reduction of the original Toyota seven wastes to improve overall customer value, but there are varying perspectives on how this is best achieved. The steady growth of Toyota, from a small company to the world’s largest automaker,^[3] has focused attention on how it has achieved this success.

5S Initiative At Indian Pneumatic And Hydraulic is our first effort in implementing LEAN.We have already completed a couple of sessions in one of our office rooms. The result have been very encouraging.

We got one of our supervisors in the fray, Mr Jitesh Shetty has taken the lead in one of our initiatives. Assisting him able were Shaji George and Lalit Singh. I must add they have done a wonderful job. Check out some of the photographs. There are still more people who are yet to complete a 5S project before we move slowly into the factory. Some of our workers have also imeplemnted some elements of 5S which will require a separate post.

Please excuse the low quality images. They were taken from a phone of a good enthusiastic employee which is really great of him.

Hydraulic Cylinder Calculation

We have created a set of online tools for hydraulic pneumatic cylinder calculations to help customers do that sitting in their own offices.

Why Hydraulic Cylinder Calculation?

We often have customers who come in with a requirement to push/lift loads of 500Kg or maybe 5000Kg (We make cylinders which can lift both easily!). Since they are not specialists in hydraulic and pneumatic cylinder manufacturing; Often we have to help them and guide them through the motions of hydraulic and pneumatic cylinder selection.

While we are extremely happy to do this, we find that our customers require a quick reply to two common questions

What bore size do i need to lift 5tons?
Will a 125 bore cylinder i already have lift my current requirement of 50 tonne?

Since we like helping our customers, we decided to use our own tool and put it on the web.