A revolutionary new product designed and manufactured by Barnstaple-based Parker Instrumentation promises to save global process Industries millions of pounds a year.

Parker Instrumentation's new CCIMS represents a radical rethink of traditional engineering practice by allowing industrial engineers to connect pressure measurement devices directly to process piping in a tiny fraction of the time previously taken. At the same time, it dramatically increases safety by reducing the number of joints required - and every joint is a potential leak path. 'The key for British manufacturing is innovation - we have the best engineering brains in the world, and we need to use them', says Richard Roebuck, Marketing Manager at Parker Instrumentation.

'Process industries are paring their costs to the bone, to remain competitive, and our radical rethink of traditional time-consuming practices is attracting enormous interest from around the world'.

Think oil, gas, power generation, water processing or chemicals, and you think pipework.

And the flow within that pipework has to be carefully and constantly monitored.

To do that, requires a special instrument to be connected to the piping.

It sounds simple, but the connection process - which has remained unchanged for the last 40 years - normally involves complex 'plumbing in' of tubing, connections and valves, an exercise which can take several days to complete.

Multiply that by the hundreds of thousands of these instruments sold each year, and the costs in terms of skilled labour time are formidable.

In contrast, CCIMS simply plugs onto the process pipework, with no welds or threaded connections and fewer opportunities for fluid to escape, in just 30 minutes - which is a tiny fraction of the time previously taken.

That's an astonishing saving, but the potential for time savings which CCIMS opens up becomes even more significant in the light of the current trend for unmanned installations and drilling platforms.

Companies desperate to minimise costs in the face of worldwide competitors are increasingly turning to highly automated plant, where engineers' visits are costed to the minute.

'On average, we expect plant operators to save more than 12 hours on each CCIMS installation', adds Richard Roebuck.

'And with half a million flow measurement instruments sold every year, the savings are almost unimaginable'.

Parker expects that over 90% of these new products will be exported, and has just taken its first order, from Saudi Aramco in the Middle East - the world's largest oil producing company.

'We know that we have a product that addresses a genuine need because we worked closely with customers during development', stated Parker Instrumentation's General Manager, Ian Huggins.

'The Saudi Aramco order will be the first of many - we are expecting several more in the coming weeks from similar blue-chip organisations'.

CCIMS is the result of some two years of development work at Parker Instrumentation's Innovation Centre in Barnstaple.

The company's parent - the Parker Hannifin corporation of Cleveland, USA - was so enthusiastic about the potential that it added over US $2 million of funding to accelerate development.