Your industrial facility is not a static object—it has more in common with a living organism that grows and matures in time. Choosing the wrong electrical infrastructure solutions today can make your facility feel like a snail or hermit crab outgrowing its shell tomorrow: Your organization will eventually need to abandon them once it outgrows them and find a new, more accommodating solution.
Off-the-shelf electrical solutions can easily end up costing your business in more ways than just their financial burdens—such as by causing lowered productivity, difficulty meeting regulatory standards, or a dulled competitive edge. Industrial electrical services that focus on developing custom solutions empower you to build better infrastructure that will save money in the long run and keep your facility competitive in a crowded industry.
How Custom Solutions Solve Unique Industrial Electrical Challenges
While off-the-shelf solutions can fall short of meeting your unique needs, expert industrial electrical services offer custom-designed electrical infrastructure tailored to put your business in a position to thrive. Custom electrical solutions outperform off-the-shelf products and one-size-fits-all systems by:
Addressing Unique Conditions and Requirements
Commercial electrical services provide custom solutions that take into account the unique requirements and challenges of your industrial facility, including your legacy systems.
Unless you’re building a new facility entirely from scratch, you already have many legacy systems and solutions in place; remodeling to take advantage of the latest electrical innovations doesn’t mean you must throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Designing Electrical Solutions Around Legacy Systems
When you choose an off-the-shelf solution to upgrade or expand your electrical infrastructure, you might end up struggling to connect it to your existing systems without running into frustrating compatibility issues that reduce your productivity and efficiency—defeating the purpose of your electrical upgrades in the first place.
However, commercial and industrial electrical services focused on custom solutions take your existing systems in mind and build around them to maximize compatibility. “Legacy” does not always mean “outdated and in dire need of replacement”—keep what works working smoothly with the help of professional electricians with commercial and industrial experience.
Optimizing Electrical Solutions for Efficiency
By choosing custom electrical solutions instead of off-the-shelf systems and products, you have the power to ensure that new automation tools, smart technologies, and energy-efficient systems are specifically selected and tailored to optimize the efficiency of your existing industrial processes.
Guaranteeing Adherence to Compliance and Safety Standards
The strict regulatory and safety standards in your industry place stringent demands on the features and capabilities of your electrical system. Tailored commercial and industrial electrical services excel where off-the-shelf solutions fall short here: The latter might not be guaranteed to meet all the high standards unique to your industry, since it is most likely to be designed for general safety and compliance concerns.
When you make use of custom commercial electrical services, your solution can be designed from the ground up with knowledge of your industry’s regulatory demands in mind. As a result, your solution is more capable of minimizing the risk of safety hazards harming your workers or inviting regulatory penalties.
Providing Scalable, Future-Proof Solutions
Industrial electrical services focused on custom solutions can build electrical infrastructure for your facility that anticipates your expected future needs and is designed to make expansion and further development easier.
A custom electrical infrastructure solution can also incorporate cutting-edge technologies and innovations that might not be available in standard off-the-shelf products, giving you a competitive edge today that you can preserve well into tomorrow as technological progress marches on.
Offering Long-Term Cost-Effectiveness
One downside to custom electrical infrastructure solutions compared to off-the-shelf solutions is that the upfront costs of a custom solution are almost always by definition higher. The hard work and expertise that goes into commercial and industrial electrical services is an added cost compared to off-the-shelf solutions.
However, given that custom solutions more reliably and effectively meet your industrial facility’s unique needs, in the long run, your custom electrical solution is far more likely to come out ahead in terms of cost-effectiveness.
Custom solutions are often longer-lasting and more reliable, reducing the long-term costs of maintenance, repairs, or replacement. Custom electrical systems can also be designed for optimal energy efficiency, further reducing your operational costs in the long run compared to off-the-shelf solutions.
Improving Reliability and Minimizing Downtime
The productivity and pace of your industrial operations depend heavily on the reliability of your electrical systems. Just as safety regulations can vary from one industry to another, the standards of reliability your electrical systems must meet might vary as well.
Custom-designed electrical infrastructure by electricians with commercial and industrial expertise can take into account the unique features and conditions of your facility and your daily operations that influence what a system needs to be truly reliable, such as redundancy and fault tolerance.
Some degree of system downtime may be inevitable, but a custom system can be designed such that when you need to shut things down for scheduled maintenance or emergency repairs, you can get back up and running again quickly.
Real-World Example: Fiber Optic Installation
For an example of how custom solutions outperform off-the-shelf solutions, consider fiber optics. incorporating fiber optic installation into custom industrial infrastructure offers high-speed data transmission with immunity to electromagnetic interference and resistance to harsh industrial environments, reducing the risk of digital communication failures.
The high-speed and high-bandwidth data transmission enabled by fiber optic installation also future-proofs industrial electrical systems by improving compatibility with cutting-edge products, such as IoT and smart devices. You might not be able to take full advantage of fiber optics with an off-the-shelf solution, but a custom solution can incorporate fiber optics in a way that makes the most sense for your unique needs.
Getting Results From Electricians With Commercial and Industrial Expertise
There is no shortage of potential benefits to custom commercial and industrial electrical services compared to off-the-shelf solutions. However, custom solutions can only truly guarantee better results than off-the-shelf solutions if they are implemented by expert electricians with commercial and industrial electrical service experience.
At Winn-Marion, we provide end-to-end industrial electrical services built on a solid foundation of over five decades of industry experience. Our deep knowledge of a wide range of industries from architecture, engineering and construction to water treatment combined with our hands-on experience with a vast array of industrial electrical products and solutions make us uniquely suited to finding the best custom solutions to meet your facility’s current and future needs.
Contact us at any of our Winn-Marion locations nationwide to find out what our electricians and engineers can do for you.