When you’re handling a product where the tiniest quality flaw can derail the entire production process, attention to detail matters — big time. And in the case of the Bayport site’s recent campaign producing the molasses-like polymer used in makeup products, the team could have easily found themselves in a sticky situation. Instead, they delivered in a major way, not only hitting deadlines, but coming in way ahead of schedule and reducing production costs in the process.

“Since the polybutene is used to produce makeup foundation and ChapStick products, quality is extremely important and particularly stringent,” Kris Sturgul, Bayport Site Leader, explained. “One ‘spec’ in a trailer sample can cause the trailer to be rejected, resulting in hours or days of re-filtering, or an additional cost at Third Coast for them to filter it. As a result, there’s a lot of analytical requirements and tests performed, on top of carefully managing the logistics of handling the material as it gets transferred from our reactor to our tank to the truck, and finally to the Third Coast for drumming.”

Tack on the additional pressure of a quickly approaching site-wide shut down, and there’s simply no room for error. While the team has been performing polybutene campaigns once a year for almost 3 decades, it was a first for the loaders on the job. But thanks to personal accountability and strong communication, they all handled it like pros.

“The crew was meticulous in the housekeeping of the equipment to make sure everything was protected and successfully loaded every trailer on spec, ” Danny Kowalski, Process Engineer & CTL/Logistics Supervisor, shared. “To achieve this type of success, everyone in operations, maintenance, and the labs bought into this attention to detail and took the responsibility on themselves to get the job done.”

Thanks to this attention to detail, Danny and his team were able to predict the schedule for every drumming appointment and loading time for a whole month out by the time they were just on the third of 15 trailers, moving things along quickly.

“Typically we would do 2 trailers a week, but in this campaign, we were able to do 3 per week the entire month, allowing us to increase our capacity to load about 50%,” Danny added. “And typically in a campaign like this we use up to 1,000 pounds of catalyst, but by achieving the level of quality we did in this campaign, we reduced that usage down to 300 lbs, decreasing the overall workload and impacting costs.”

With a target project timeline of 1,290 hours, the Bayport team’s wrapped up in just 1,041, freeing up an extra 10 days to allot to additional volume.

“At $30K of capacity per day, this extra time equates to over $300K in new product for us,” Liam McMillan, Custom Manufacturing Manager, explained. “It will also be used to seed volume to justify larger capex projects; for example, doubling Hydrogenation capacity with R160 production.

“To get the product in early, especially with today’s supply chain issues, and produce excellent rates, great yields, and high quality, the customer was thrilled. Danny and the team really delivered, and it was a major win for everyone.”