Growth has been a common trend for the Monument Houston team since the site opened its doors in 2008. And with the addition of an increasingly expanding custom manufacturing portfolio, that growth prompted some big decisions and major additions Because while our pipeline increased, our distillation capacity wasn’t increasing with it. So the team decided it was time to stop racking our brains on how to maximize the space we had — and make a lot more of it!

“As our custom manufacturing pipeline really began to grow, we realized increasing our distillation capacity was a necessity,” Jeff Gould, FP&A Manager, explained. “Our team looked into multiple asset investment options to grow this capacity, and we decided the best opportunity was creating a designated DAA, MO train with the addition of two new distillation columns that would allow us to not only increase production capabilities, but also reduce cycle times for some of our key derivatives.”

When talking about increased production speeds, that means 6-8 week turnaround times dropped to just 2-3 weeks, resulting in remarkable capital savings internally. And for our customers, this allows our team to bring not only more value through quicker turnaround times, but also elevated quality and reliability.

“With customers in the high-purity electronics market, producing these molecules in a dedicated, continuous distillation column is really important,” Dave Hansen, Sales Director, shared. “It’s going to help us increase overall purity and reduce elemental metal contamination. Growth in the high-purity market is critical for Monument, our customers, and the world — so this is a big win for everyone” 

The continuous distillation process will also have a positive impact on the Houston site’s overall sustainability initiatives too — minimizing the amount of product sitting in storage.

“The ability to continuously produce these acetone derivatives means we can minimize our energy usage, while limiting the amount of product and crude just sitting in storage,” said Sarves Peri, VP, Business Team Leader. “These initiatives are very important not only to us as a business, but also to our clients as their partner.”

In the past, our restraints on capacity led to the need for prioritizing projects and rationalizing return and timelines — all of which presented barriers to growth for the team.

“We were having to make some tough decisions on projects that could have been incrementally beneficial to our pipeline,” Jeff shared. “This additional capacity allows us to expand that bandwidth and bring in more products, tolls, and business at every level of need to better support all of our customers and the industry as a whole.”

The new DAA, MO distillation columns are specifically used for the product side of our business to produce acetone derivatives — but that’s not the only area of business seeing growth as a result.

“The additional capacity has also allowed us to free up our multi-use columns for custom manufacturing customers,” Adam Pingel, VP, Operations, explained. “With more bandwidth, we’ve been able to expand that growth into multiple pipelines and bring in new business that we just couldn’t before.” 

While the new columns have only been running for a little over a month, the Houston team is already taking away key learnings to improve processes — company wide.

“Some of our discoveries in the workflow processes have helped us put together a new capital execution policy to better identify potential changes to the scope during long-term projects,” Tom Del Prato, Growth and Capital Process Manager, explained. “Now, every project will go through a rigorous analysis process to ensure all cost and risk impacts are accounted for prior to moving on to the next phase. These new columns have essentially served as beta testing for this policy to help us fine tune it, and our learnings have given us a plan for better execution moving forward that all Monument sites can now use.”

And there are even more improvements to come!

“We’re also discovering how to improve our accounting structure and how we classify and itemize costs to better understand a project's status in real time,” Maria Kraemer Gutierrez, Houston S&OP Leader added. “Even though the columns were designed for DAA MO processes, they’ve had a big impact across multiple areas, and now, we're looking at how we can be creative with minimal capital to improve elsewhere too. Our goal is to just keep evolving our capabilities to better serve our clients and create more opportunities for us as a business moving forward.”