The last few months have seen SKF South Africa substantially expanding its engineering team and services to keep in step with the company’s new technology and service developments as well as to address changing customer demands.

According to SKF Engineering Manager, Chris Lubbe, customers are experiencing the negative impact of the country’s exacerbating skills shortage more and more. “With fewer skilled people to take care of equipment on site, customers are placing increasingly heavier demands on OEM’s like SKF and are requesting more support from our engineers.

The transformation of our engineering team which has grown five times over the past eighteen months enables us to seamlessly address this market shift.”

SKF is also putting less focus on Capex and more effort into its renowned contract services, after-market maintenance management and reliability service portfolio. “These have always been part and parcel of the SKF landscape; we are just taking it to the next level,” states Lubbe. SKF’s expansion strategy aligns perfectly with the company’s focus on taking full ownership of its equipment throughout its entire lifecycle which goes hand-in-hand with building solid, long-term customer partnerships.

“Our engineering team now takes a lot more responsibility for understanding and improving the machine operating at a customer’s site. We are now perfectly positioned to offer support to all our customers, whether they are operating world-class maintenance programmes or older, less efficient plants; these require two very different skill sets.”

SKF’s current complement of fifteen engineers support the company’s various departments and operate in four areas; application and project engineering, custom design and condition monitoring. “It all starts with our sales teams who have to find optimal solutions for our customers’ applications.

Here our application engineers step in to provide general support to the sales department.” Lubbe explains that this is part of a broader long-term strategy to equip the sales teams with more technical skills to achieve improved overall efficiency to the ultimate benefit of the customer.

The responsibility of SKF’s project engineering team is to support upgrades and new installations while the customs design team looks at bearing housing and seal modifications. The condition monitoring engineers lend supports to SKF’s condition monitoring experts on system implementation such as SKF’s IMx Multi-Log online system, a compact, easy-to-use machine health monitoring system that provides remotely accessible machine health data in real time.

SKF has also employed four young trainee engineers who, according to Lubbe, are already proving their worth and adding value through their new and refreshing approaches. “They sometimes make us look at things from a different perspective and to tackle challenges in exciting new ways to find premium solutions.”

Lubbe adds that there have already been a number of successful developments including a fully portable IMx datalogger designed and built by graduates with Master degrees in vibration analysis to support SKF’s Rotating equipment Performance (REP) offering.

The engineering team is also exploring the use of Teflon coatings for plummer blocks subjected to acidic conditions and severe corrosion. Lubbe explains that they are currently developing a prototype of an acid-proof housing that relies on SKF’s triple-barrier sealing solution. In addition to a smoothed housing surface to prevent any build-up of acidic slurry, all exposed surfaces are manufactured or coated with SKF’s acid resistant engineering plastics, E-ECOPUR and Teflon.

SKF’s triple-barrier sealing solution has inner seal protection from the sealed spherical roller bearing itself which is installed in a housing with a 70 to 90% grease fill that completely isolates it from the sealed bearing to form the second barrier. Additionally, the acid-proof housing is sealed from outside contamination using a Taconite multi-stage labyrinth cartridge seal which forms the third barrier.

Wrapping up, Lubbe says, “The amplification of SKF’s engineering services will be an ongoing drive that reflects the significance we place on offering life-time services to our customers. In addition to a premium product, SKF customers can rely on world-class service and after-sales service support across the entire life-span of the equipment from highly trained, highly skilled engineering teams.

We are excited about the future as we partner with our customers to assist them in improving the efficiencies, productivity and indeed the profitability of their businesses.”