How Green Alternative Systems Saves Time and Labor with Swagelok Custom Solutions
Green Alternative Systems (GAS) helps organizations reduce fuel costs and support sustainability goals through alternative fuel vehicle conversions. In this customer success story, learn how GAS partners with Swagelok to accelerate production, improve quality, and scale operations through custom design and assembly services. By replacing labor-intensive manual fabrication with engineered assemblies, GAS reduced vehicle upfit time from 16 hours to just 4 hours, generating significant labor savings while increasing consistency and reliability. Swagelok also collaborates closely with GAS throughout the design, engineering, testing, and production process, helping ensure high-quality alternative fuel systems. Together, the companies have built a partnership focused on efficiency, repeatability, safety, and long-term business growth.
Video Transcript
Green Alternative Systems designs, engineers, and installs alternative fuel systems. Our customers save money based on the difference in price between gasoline and natural gas or propane. The higher gasoline prices are, the more money they save. Our vehicles can meet just about any need, depending on the configuration of the base vehicle and the configuration of the fuel system. We have seen uses for airport shuttles, hotel shuttles, parcel delivery, and linen service. A lot of customers are concerned with the environmental impact of their operations, and many of them have corporate sustainability plans that encourage or require them to use alternative fuels. Major customers are really looking for a quality product at a low price. When the company first started, we were not using any pre-bent stainless steel components. What we were doing was hand-bending each individual component, and it was taking a massive amount of time.
Before we really got involved with Swagelok Custom Solutions, we were really just taking parts and using our own labor to create these assemblies. So we took their design and made them in advance. That allowed them to take what was 16 hours’ worth of time to upfit one of their vehicles and cut it down to four hours, which translated into $224,000 in labor savings in the first year that we did it. And it has only grown from there as their production has grown and we have taken on more and more assemblies.
So you have tube fittings, a ball valve, a check valve, and some custom-bent tubing to route that around the vehicle. Green Alternative Systems will determine the layout they need, and then our team will take that, do measurements and takeoffs, create a drawing, make a sample product, and send it up here. They will do a test fit onto a vehicle, and after that is approved and it works, they will sign off on a drawing, and then we are ready for production. Then we work with them to follow their production schedule, determine how many they need, and supply them just as they are ready to start their process on the vehicles. They have provided the service to build the assemblies and a way to scale that up without adding labor time or personnel to our facility, while also increasing our repeatability and the quality of the overall system. Swagelok is definitely a partner to us. Many of our other suppliers will send us a part, and we install it on the vehicle, and that is the end of the relationship. With Swagelok, we have gone through the whole design and engineering process. We have developed quality processes within Swagelok and internally at Green Alternative Systems. The cost of a system failure is catastrophic. Not only is there the financial impact, but you lose customer trust and credibility within the industry. The safety and quality aspect is of utmost importance. When we first started, we were going back and forth between Swagelok and a couple of competitors, and Swagelok just had the product that everybody was compared to. Every manufacturer that came to us always said they were compatible with Swagelok. I think our management team started realizing that and said, “Why are we not using Swagelok exclusively?” It sort of evolved from there.
