This week has seen four examples of a peculiar sort of customer service in which we bring to the customer’s attention a problem that they were’t expecting concerning the product that they had supplied or whose processing they had specified. It is unusual to have four examples in one week’s production and unusual that the responsibility is so clearly not attributable to a failure of ours. Sometimes the reward comes earlier than heaven.

In the first example the customer had supplied a suspension that we were to blend with a mixture of powders before packing into a retail pack. The suspension had separated and we needed to re-suspend the solids and keep them suspended whilst spraying into the powder blend. This work-round was acceptable to the customer but is not a perfect resolution to the problem as the solids were clearly settling so quickly that the last of the liquid, below the level of the stirrer, was separating as we sprayed it. It is also troubling that this phenomenon has not been seen to such an extent before in this product, which might suggest that the formulation was defective in some more significant way. However, the client was pleased that we had been able to keep to our production schedule and we may yet be able to help them to understand the underlying cause.

The second case was one of those parallel import jobs in which we had to  decant someone’s product and then repack it into new bottles labelled with our client’s brand. Our operator decanting the liquid noticed that there was a strange scum floating on the surface of the liquid after decanting which isn’t usually there and which was then found inside the empty decanted bottles. We proposed filtration before filling and after discussion with the client, this is what we did. Technically, nothing should be done to the input material in this parallel product but I argued that we were merely restoring it to its original state before the gum got in there.

The third case was a rush job in which a very significant customer wanted a small amount of pigment to be blended in a couple of IBCs that he sent to us early in the week. He wanted the job to be done immediately and it looked as though we could get both IBCs done in a couple of hours if we short-circuited some of our procedures to get the job up and running. All went well until the operator concerned brought a photo showing that the newly pigmented liquid quickly developed “measles” as soon as the stirring stopped. Clearly the mixture contained a component or an impurity that is not miscible with the pigment. Not such a quick job after-all, as we must now filter the pigmented liquids and return them to their original IBCs after cleaning them of any residual “measles”.

The fourth case was a matter of dissolving a large amount of dye into an acid solution. This had been undertaken previously but with only limited success after difficulties with crystallisation of the dye and the need for return from the client’s customer and then rework. This time a revised process had been agreed to avoid the problem but unfortunately our filtration step showed that a significant proportion of the dye had not been dissolved. Our slow addition had maybe not been slow enough, or maybe we should not have diluted the acid at the stage that we had done it. I doubt that this will  become one of our favourite jobs, even when we get it right.

Ironically these four examples all occurred in the week that we received our largest ever single order and on tracking the circumstances back to the reason for such a big order we can only conclude that it followed from a similar incident. Two years ago we reported to this customer that the material that his supplier had delivered to us for packing was both missing a pigment and was contaminated with rubber bands and stainless machine parts. We fixed both of these things and the gods smiled on us!

Next week we will gently try to recover some of the extra costs that these incidents have incurred. We will also expand our daily briefings into the area of Covid-19 masks now that Boris has become an enthusiast and the idiot Trump has found it expedient to wear one.