It’s Saturday evening on Memorial Day weekend, and disaster looms. An entire food production plant has been shut down for scheduled maintenance — and engineers have just discovered they have the wrong valve for a major steam line tie-in.

When we say major, we mean a four-foot-tall, 500-pound gate valve that controls a 10-inch steam line. This line feeds just about every process in the plant: heat for the factory and office, the plant’s entire domestic hot water supply, food cooking, and equipment sanitization. And the new steam line has the flexibility to allow additional new lines to be attached without further system shutdown.

Urgent request

Installation was always going to be a race against time. But when the replacement valve turned out to be the wrong size, things started looking desperate.

The mechanical and plumbing contractors called their regular distributors for the correct replacement — no luck.

But the general contractor had an idea. He had a business card from his old high school friend, Arron Marshall, account manager for The Macomb Group. He passed it to the mechanical and plumbing contractor’s foreman, who called Macomb’s 24/7 hotline.

Within a short time, Ken Ensman, one of the counter staff at The Macomb Group’s Sterling Heights, Michigan branch, was onsite checking inventory. Macomb not only had the valve in stock, we had 39 of them!

Huge relief

“I called the foreman back to let him know we had the valves in Detroit and could have one to him Sunday morning, which was a huge relief to him and the food company’s engineer,” Arron says. “Then we called the transportation company’s rep, who came in to meet Ken, who amazingly came in again Sunday morning to load up the valve. We had the 10-inch gate valve in the contractor’s hands before 11 a.m. Sunday morning on Memorial Day weekend!”

Panic over. The valve was installed, and the plant was up and running on schedule after the extended weekend. What’s more, Macomb had now established a firm relationship with the food manufacturer and the contractor by demonstrating our ability to deliver when other vendors can’t.

“This was an amazing feat to accomplish,” says Arron. “It took a whole team of people at Macomb to take time out of their holiday weekend to take care of one of their customers, and all of us at Macomb do it with a smile on our faces.”

Arron sums up the unique value Macomb brought to this customer — and brings to every one of our customers. “You can find 100 different pipe wholesale houses that will gladly sell you anything you want Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.,” Arron says. “But Macomb is the only one that I know of that’ll gladly open up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the smallest of fittings to the largest of valves, if it will help solve your problem.”

When you’re in a bind, The Macomb Group experts are here for you. Contact us by email at [email protected] or by phone at 888-756-4110.