During the Expandability 2007 users conference in Las Vegas, Jan Young of SKF Condition Monitoring and Bob Fraustein of Quantum Design, came up with the idea of starting a San Diego chapter of the Expandable Users Group.

“We started off by contacting our local Expandable sales rep, Brent Clark, to get a listing of all companies using Expandable in San Diego,” said Jan. Brent provided the list and Jan followed up to see if there was any interest in starting a group. Eight companies responded positively, so a planning meeting was hosted by SKF Condition Monitoring, Inc. on June 13, 2007

Twelve people from seven companies attended the event and after discussing the content, frequency and length of time for future meetings the group decided that every other month for two hours during lunch time was a reasonable target.

“We also decided each company would host a meeting,” said Jan Young. “Our goal is to spend about an hour discussing the selected topic and the rest of the time having lunch and networking.”

Jan took on the responsibility of sending invitations and reminders of upcoming meetings and a second meeting was hosted by Quantum Design on Aug. 15, 2007. “The topic was ‘A look at Costing and Variances in Expandable,’” said Jan Young, “and Bill Cowley of Gurusome Consulting did a great job with the overview from setting up parameters for labor/overhead to rolling standards and ways to post WIP variances.”

“We feel that having local companies get together in a smaller setting discussing best practices is an enhancement to the yearly users group,” Jan commented, “but by no means is this a replacement to the annual Expandable users conference.”