Welding technology and my journey to Salesforce

I was selected for a multinational company ADOR as a shift engineer (It had a different name then) but trust me I was not happy with my job. I always wanted to work in marketing so I kept trying for that and soon I was able to convince my HR and DGM. They shifted me to marketing department but I had to go for further training in two different institutes, one- Management and marketing and the second metallurgy even though I had a fairly good idea of welding technology.

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I completed both of them in the next one and a half years and joined salesforce I knew that they would send me to a regional office. They sent me to Delhi region which has the largest industrial areas. I was allotted a territory and I started meeting chief engineers and concerned engineers telling them about the use of special electrodes manufactured by our company.

Let me mention here that we have hundreds of medium and large welding electrode manufacturing units in India but the welding electrodes I am talking about were specialty of ADOR and Larsen & Toubro and up to some extent Indian Oxygen but our main competitors were Larsen & Toubro however, we were ranked number one and we were proud of this fact.

I was working and enjoying as it gave me new opportunities to learn more every day. I thought I knew a lot about welding technology but the engineers at the industrial units knew their job so I wasn't facing much problems in convincing them. However, cast iron welding always posed problems for me even if we had a number of products in low heat electrodes which worked at 30 amperes using reverse poles or special welding transformers.

I would like to mention here an incident that changed my concept of "I know it all" and I learned to be more humble and accept my faults easily. I was in a large sugar mill in NCR area of India and talking to a floor engineer and his welders. I wanted to introduce a new product for surface hardening with the help of electrodes and gave them a pack of 10 electrodes which our company had recently sent to me for demonstration purposes.

One of the welders started using it and he suddenly asked me, "Why is it emitting green smoke?"

Trust me I had no idea. I thought what a silly question. Everyone knows when we use a welding electrode the flux coating keeps the arc stable, helps make bead and protects melted metal filling from oxidation. But why green smoke? That was a question that bowled me out. There were no mobile phones in those days so I went to the chief engineer's office and talked to my DGM technical. He explained me the reason and I explained it to the welder but neither of us was fully satisfied.

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From then on I started working on different fluxes used in different welding electrodes. I even asked our chief chemist when I met him during a seminar at Cochchi dockyard the biggest shipyard of India where we had gone for a seminar. He told me a number of finer points about welding technologies and flux but what he told me was all available in books. By the way, he never shared his flux making formulas even with the directors of the company but he made the different lots for different electrodes himself.

But in a nutshell, the flux coating on a welding electrode is a combination of chemicals and it keeps mother metal safe from impurities available in the atmosphere, the release of gases and as a shield on welded material. We use different types of fluxes for different electrodes which emit different smoke and most of them are not safe for human health.