This week we saw the last of the seasonal work and seemingly, all of a sudden, we don’t have enough work for everyone.

One of the jobs that I had committed to do is being frustrated by the non-delivery of a key ingredient. We are in the hands of the UK distributor and the principal has experienced a series of delays, culminating in 2 weeks so far, in delivering to the distributor. This of no interest to our customer’s customer who is just angry that we have not been able to supply. It is frustrating because it seems to be impossible transmit the pain back to the source of the problem.

Meanwhile we have started to clear up some of the jobs that have been put to one side and these have highlighted some stock shortages.

We have at least two customer year-end stock counts and they seem to have passed off OK.

The big excitement concerns the commissioning of our new vessel for the manufacture of the gloopy stuff. The equipment was finally installed and we made the first 5,000L batch yesterday. We should have some results on Monday and we still need to do some programming but at last the capacity is there. We just need to optimise the performance and build on it to produce 50,000litres per week. There is still much to do but at last we have the basis for producing the volume required!

This is good for the business because we have a clear run making as much as we can for the next two months which will go some way to counteract the usual Summer decline.