MC² Market & Competitive Convergence

October 12, 2000
Newark, Delaware USA

Article appeared in Filtration News

I got up early and schlepped from the comforts of my Hudson Highlands home (an area north of The City on the Hudson River) to attend  the American Filtration & Separation Society’s Mid-Atlantic regional meeting in Newark, Delaware, a trip of some three hours through one of the most congested areas in America, with toll booth after toll booth, a factor, I was later to learn, that correlates well to filtration.

The meeting was organized by Jerry Lynch, former industrial filtration business manager of Hayward Industrial Products, Elizabeth, New Jersey and now owner of Sigma Design an engineering design company located in Springfield New Jersey, not far from where he used to work. Although he said there were many last-minute changes, the meeting, held in a Holiday Inn, had relevant topics and well prepared speakers. The coffee and donuts at breaks, and the buffet lunch  provided a good atmosphere for schmoozing and networking.

Some great Hollywood actor once said that 90% of  success can be attributed to just showing up, and at this regional meeting, filter manufacturers, distributors, and end users showed up, making for a well cast event, with some 20 players in attendance.

Ernie Mayer, an internal filter engineering consultant at DuPont, gave his end-user perspective on pressure filters. For a pressure filter manufactures this was a golden opportunity to hear the opinions of someone with vast experience with centrifuges, and all types of plates and frames, belt, tubular and you-name-it filters. This kind of unfiltered straight talk could be hard to take for those on the receiving end of Mayer’s criticism . But, to his credit, Mayer gave specific reasons for their short comings. Positioning products into specific applications should start from the perspective of the end-user. It’s here that you get: “This product works best where...” or “It fails when...”, “It doesn’t compare to...,” or as we heard Mayer say several times, “It doesn’t work, period.” In Meyer’s experience, most automated filter equipment had such short comings with cake release that labor was always needed to keep them running, driving up costs instead of delivering the labor savings as promised.

Michael Ruyak, president of Klinkau America, had the problem of following an excellent presentation, but had the benefit of being one of the few filter equipment manufacturers to have passed Meyer’s muster. Klinkau manufactures a unique filter plate for plate and frame filter presses, which the industry has dubbed membrane filter press. So, I learned, after harboring the notion that real membranes were used, that no membranes, as such, are used. It’s actually a recessed plate with a flexible area for compressing the cake, offering the capability for washing and vacuum drying, too. The impact these devices have on our environment and economy is quite amazing. A case study was presented where a dangerous waste was detoxified and recycled as fertilizer, providing better crop yields than conventional fertilizers, and all this while helping to pay for the filter equipment, to boot.

Joseph Youberg of Pall Trincor gave a very informative presentation about Pall’s latest liquid coalescers. Their PhaseSep line is designed to separate dispersed liquid, whose interfacial tensions are below 20 dyne/cm. The AquaSep line is designed to separate water from petroleum products and chemicals where surfacants are present, a challenge for conventional coalescers, said Youberg. He also explained the concepts behind their Ultipleat filter cartridge construction  Pall seldom makes presentations at filtration events, so these developments were new to most of us in the audience. At Trincor, Pall sells directly to customers in Southern New York State, New Jersey, Eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia, using four market-focused sales people to cover  polymer, process, refinery and power generation applications

At the lunch, I was fortunate to sit at a table with filter manufacturers and distributors. For me it was like an impromptu focus panel, with the conversation covering distribution issues that effected distributors, and manufacturers, as well as end users. Topics like US Filter’s distributor acquisitions, Cuno’s direct sales strategy in the Mid-Atlantic area, Parker selling through Harrington Plastics, WACO’s expansion in the Mid-West, Texas and Louisiana, consolidations in the power industry, and the affects of e-commerce were discussed. In spite of all the changes, there was a spirit of optimism and sense of prosperity. A good economy, like the tide, raises all ships.

On the way home, I thought of how Youberg had so effectively used the analogy of the New Jersey Turnpike’s toll booths to describe how filters worked. The road was the pipe, the traffic the flow, the tolls were filters, the booths pores, the cars particles, and pressure drop was directly proportional to rush-hour traffic volume. But now the Turnpike has switched to EZPass, with window shield bar codes and automatic billing. I should tell him the Turnpike is now using prefiltration, lowering the pressure drop, while increasing the flow and increasing revenue.

Ross West
Founder of MC2 Market & Competitive Convergence, a sales and marketing consultancy