4 Ways to Scale Data Center Control Panel Production
The demand for data centers is booming with plans for new data center construction releasing each day. If you are part of a data center construction team, you need partners that can scale at the same rate as you. This includes your industrial control panel partner.
Industrial control panels are an integral part of data centers, holding power infrastructure, cooling systems, building management systems, and more. Once you find a partner that can build top-quality data center control panels to maintain uptime, it is important to understand how you can scale with one another. Below are four guidelines to follow when scaling data center control panel production with your partner.
1- Standardize panel designs wherever possible
The first step in scaling data center control panel production is to standardize wherever possible. Once you are able to produce industrial control panels that fit your exact specifications, standardizing certain aspects of your control panels can help streamline the assembly process, allowing your partner to scale up production quicker.
Standardizing control panel designs can include:
- Building a library of different control panel designs to fit specific needs
- Standardizing the reoccurring components used across different control panel designs
This helps your partner reduce the amount of time needed to learn new custom control panel designs each time a new panel needs to be built, ultimately making scaling production a much smoother process.
2- Partner with a Turnkey Data Center Control Panel Partner
Ensuring you have the right partnership in place is another imperative part of scaling data center control panel production. Partnering with a turnkey assembly company for data center control panels can help ease responsibilities from your internal team, allowing them to focus on the larger project at hand.
A turnkey partner should provide:
- Design for manufacturability
- Component sourcing
- Panel assembly
- Testing
- Documentation
A partner that can provide all of the above will have a deep understanding of your control panel needs because they are involved in all portions of the assembly process. This means your partner will be able to find solutions to reach your production goals without as much guidance from your internal team. This, ultimately, helps you and the partner scale quicker than you would be able to when using a group of many assembly vendors.
3- Improve Supply Chain Planning
Lead times are a perpetual issue that can halt scaling efforts. Long lead times on breakers, PLCs, power distribution components, and networking hardware can all delay panel builds. Working with a partner that has:
- Component sourcing abilities
- Great relationships with component vendors
- Component obsolescence solutions
- Inventory management solutions
can help you cut lead times on data center control panels. This allows your team to focus resources on the larger data center construction project rather than spending as much time on sourcing for only control panels.
4- Invest in Testing and Documentation Practices
Premature control panel failures can deeply hinder your ability to scale. To avoid premature failures, make sure to invest in a data center control panel partner that priorities testing and documentation practices.
Testing and documentation throughout the assembly process confirms that wire connections are made properly and the panel is built to exact specs. Documentation also helps identify and address issues quickly if panels were to fail prematurely.
It may take some extra time during the assembly process, yet it is worth every second to ensure panels are going to work properly once in-use. Downtime can quickly become the most costly endeavor for data centers.
Because the demand for data centers has skyrocketed over the past few years, it is important to find partners that can scale operations with you quickly. If you are a part of a data center construction team and are looking for a data center control panel partner that can scale with you, look no further than MIS Controls. Contact us today to learn more about our data center control panel capabilities: https://www.miscontrols.com/contact-us/