Nominated by: Chris Svoboda, VP, Human Resources and Adam Pingel, Manufacturing

When you’re part of customer’s supply chain, you can only risk disappointing them once. If you can’t keep up, they will find another way to meet their needs – leaving you out.

This was precisely the type of situation the Kallo team wanted to avoid.

For more than 25 years, the site has offered hydrolysis, a unique custom manufacturing technology to customers, enabling them to balance outputs for their molecules and maximize the value of their portfolio. Hydrolyzed molecules offer optimum heat stability and color as per market feedback. The reactor used in the hydrolysis process, R115, originally had a capacity that was much more than what was needed when the equipment was first brought online.

“As business has grown, we saw that overall production capacity had begun to diminish, putting our ability to meet existing customers’ needs at risk,” said Sofie De Moor, Business Development Manager. “At the same time, there has been very strong growth in consumer end-markets and we didn’t want to turn away new customers who were knocking at our door and pass up the opportunity to earn their business.”

Seeing a very strong demand for fatty acids early in the year, the team knew they would need to quickly identify and implement a solution to increase production capacity. Hydrolyzed fatty acids are used in a wide variety of consumer products in markets that are booming, such as household cleaning, personal care and nutrition.

Maarten Mys and Frederik de Troyer are relatively new to the Process Technology department and led the focused improvement program. Both joined Monument about a year ago – but instead of this being a drawback, their ability to provide new perspectives was a benefit to the project, prompting the team to take a step back and question how the whole system had been running.

They began by using a planned shutdown to isolate the reactor and refining columns used to understand which component was slowing the process. After making some urgent repairs needed to R115, capacity was able to be increased. Once the system was brought back online, the team then pushed the operating parameters of the reactor to increase conversion, bringing capacity from 75 MT/day up to 82 MT/day.

Believing that the source of the bottleneck was in the refining columns being used, the team then turned their focus to K106. By temporarily replacing this with the oversized column K112, capacity was expanded to 93 MT/day – and with these tests being done on a live plant, it was imperative that product quality be maintained throughout the process.

Encouraged by these results, the team worked to validate that the new reactor settings would work with the default system that used R115-101-106. These tests have shown to be successful, with capacity of the larger train increasing to 90 MT/day. The improvement program is still ongoing and involves additional process optimizations, modifications, and small investments being made to the primary system. A related improvement project is also in progress on the second, smaller train, with the ultimate goal of reaching capacity of 125 MT/day for both trains.

“This project has been an excellent example of how taking a step back to look at the big picture and testing creative solutions can deliver significant rewards. We can now comfortably meet the needs of existing customers and pursue new business development opportunities,” said Sofie.