It was a dark and stormy night and the Cap’n said to the Bosun, “Bosun tell us a story!” So the Bosun began.

Long long ago (about 14 days) the Salesman said to the Client “we can repack that powder for you, it looks pretty straight forward, we should be able to pack a three tonnes in a day but if you want to use soluble bags we recommend that we pack the soluble bags in an outer polythene bag to keep the moisture out”, and the Client agreed.

The Client was unusually keen for the job to start and delivered all of the material for repacking plus the soluble bags and boxes to put it in by the Thursday and paid by the following day and asked if he could pick up the product the following Monday. The Salesman thought that the Client would wait for it to fit into the production plan (which was quite busy, being February). The Client kept ringing up to find out when the product would be ready.

Meanwhile the Technical Man had to set up the paperwork for the job to define all of the components and the production procedure and ensure that the business system would be able to account for it all and the Production Men would know what to do. All in accordance with the ISO 9002, oh best beloved.

Things didn’t go well at the preparation stage when the Mechanical Genius tried to set a machine to hold the soluble bag and allow a controlled flow of powder into the bag so just the right weight landed in the bag which could then be sealed closed. First the bag was a size that meant a new set of jaws had to be made to grip the bag and hold it open. Then the powder proved to be one of those that either flow like water or just sit there looking at you in the hopper. It was obviously necessary to move to a different filling line but that was occupied for a couple of days. The Client kept ringing up to find out when the product would be ready.

Eventually it was possible to move to a new line where there was a rotary valve to control the water-like flow and a hopper vibratory station to get the powder to flow when it was stuck. The trouble was that the vibration tended to separate the heavier particles in the powder from the lighter ones so that the “weight in flight” was variable and so the filling weight control became difficult and much “topping up” was required. A lot of dust got on the floor but filling was now possible and the Production Men gritted their teeth to get the job done. The Client kept ringing up to find out when the product would be ready and then demanded that a tonne of the powder be returned to Southampton overnight so that he could go back to his bucket and spade method to keep his customer happy.

In the first proper day of filling the Production Men found that some of the bags supplied by the Client had holes in them or the bottoms hadn’t been sealed. More dust was spilled and the Production Men gritted their teeth harder. They managed a little over half a tonne on this first day.

The next day dawned and the inevitable climb up the learning curve meant that the Production Men achieved an above target output of 1.2 tonnes. The end was in sight. The job finished the following morning, Friday, and the clean-up was concluded by lunch time. Five pallets of product were sitting there wrapped and ready to go. The yield was a creditable 97% and the client said he would arrange to collect the pallets on Monday. The two tonne job had taken three days, two men and considerable amount of the Mechanical Genius’s time. The business benefits, it was agreed, would all be “strategic”.

The Technical Man told his wife all about it that night in bed and it suddenly occurred to him that he hadn’t seen any of the Production Men using the polythene bags that would be so useful to protect the soluble bags from moisture. He had a bad night worrying that he might have forgotten to mention this in the production instructions, so after breakfast he checked and to his relief he found that he had included them in the instructions. He telephoned the factory to ask the Production Men working there if they would just take a look at one of the boxes on the pallet to confirm that his instructions had been followed. The bad news was that the instructions had not even been read (and this is sadly true of even the best ISO9002 tribe oh best beloved) there was not a single polythene bag to be found. Indeed had the instruction been read the specified bag would have been deemed to be too small and the Technical Man would have been dragged from his cupboard and forced to specify a suitable substitute.

Under these circumstances and an imminent collection, the Production Men set about finding a substitute bag and re-packing the soluble bags into the substitute bag and resealing the cartons and re-palletising them. Four Production men took two hours to complete half of the pallets that Saturday morning. Although what they found might be said to be one of those invaluable lessons that only a massive cock-up like this can teach.

Many of the cartons that were opened to re-pack contained soluble bags that had opened, as if by magic, and had either failed at the seam or inexplicably at one side. This was not a failure at the original filling and sealing stage because the Production Men concerned could not possibly have ignored the amount of material falling from the bags as they loaded the cartons. Either the bags had been of poor quality from the outset or they had found enough moisture within the box for them to fail overnight.

So how will the second half of the job fare when the Production Men re-start the task of re-bagging on Monday at 06:00? Will the re-bagged soluble bags suffer the same fate within the polybags but just more slowly? What will the Client’s customer see and say when they open the cartons on site? How could these problems have been avoided? How does this help to progress the strategic ambition to be the “hedgehogs who handle difficult powders”? Should we be glad that the Technical Man didn’t have something else on his mind on Valentine’s eve?

Basically the job we do is very simple. We mix some useful ingredient with a diluent like water, or talc in the case of powders, and we pack it into suitable containers. We can do it in small amounts or in larger amounts, say 1-2,000 litres or kgs. We can do it every once in a while or every day.

This simple idea is made less simple at every turn, usually by the addition of one or more simple variations. For example, the mixture or the useful ingredient with water may be improved by the addition of one or more additional ingredients that may prevent the mixture from being too frothy or from fermenting in the warm. A powder mixture may need to improve its flow properties or absorb unwanted moisture or to be fragranced or coloured.

Some formulations can include over a dozen ingredients and sometimes they need to be pre-mixed to ensure that they are properly dispersed or reacted together before they are brought into contact with other ingredients. Sometimes the pre-mix also requires a pre-mix of one or more of its ingredients. Sometimes one or more of the ingredients need to be heated before addition because they are solid at room temperature and need to be sprayed into the mix and sometimes the water needs to be heated to combat the endothermic heat of dilution when an ingredient is dissolved in it. Sometimes the order of addition is critical to the outcome as in the wrong order a precipitate will fall out and the formulation will fail its quality criteria.

To our clients these simple variations are of critical importance and they assume that they make an insignificant impact on our simple business. They happily ask that we accommodate them with a range of different pack sizes or label variants which may or may not be for different formulations and in range of different quantities. After all it is just a few simple variations isn’t it?

As we spread our net to attract more clients and more products we add new formulations and new ingredients and new variations to our portfolio. We find that we need to acquire or accommodate a range of different, fragrances, biocides, anti-foams, pigments, dyes, emulsifiers, viscosity modifiers, moisture absorbents, absorbent granules, clays, talcs, sands, polymers, oils, solvents and chemicals of all sorts both with and without water of crystallisation.

Often we also attract variations of the client’s business model which can result in very different outcomes according to their requirement for making to order or making to stock or making to stock for immediate fulfillment of internet orders. The three approaches have very different impacts on the manufacturer.

Most of the chemicals have some form of hazard warning whether it is irritating to some part of the body, potentially hazardous to breathe, potentially sensitizing (which is a particular worry) or simply toxic, corrosive, explosive or flammable. Each one must be considered in the context of its individual use and in combination with the others in the formulation and occasionally in combination with another chemical that might be stored in the vicinity. This consideration must be documented, communicated with the people involved in the mixing and appropriate training provided with appropriate equipment to control and contain the chemicals and ultimately be worn by the operator as a final protection. The simple business must have a system to identify, record and manage all of the hazardous chemicals used in the business from the janitor and the mechanic to the laboratory and production staff. This includes the materials purchased by the company and all those provided by the clients and contractors.

It is also necessary to archive the information concerning materials that are no longer used or for which the hazard data has been changed.as well as to ensure that the business is up to date with the latest safety data for all of the chemicals currently in use. If we develop a formulation of our own to sell to someone then we must prepare a safety data sheet of our own that meets the criteria laid down in the European Regulations before we can supply it or transport it anywhere. All of this is a bit less simple.

Not forgetting the issues relating to the disposal of any waste streams generated by the process which certainly include the empty containers for all of the ingredients used. Some ingredients are particularly hazardous to marine environments and so even empty containers washed to drain could end in a river killing all the fish for miles. It can happen by accident and by the action of vandals entertaining themselves on a Sunday or Bank Holiday.The resulting publicity and fine is certainly not a simple matter. The management and security of waste is a major concern for training, supervision and continual vigilance.

There is also the matter of process technology because the actual mixing is not always done best with a simple propeller stirrer in a tank.Sometimes a more significant amount of shear is required and sometimes the speed and shape of the mixer is itself critical to success. Then similar considerations arise for powder blends or granule making which may be highly sophisticated processes in themselves or simply difficult to manage the resulting blend because it flows too easily or not at all. Solid formulations may also have issues concerning the need for grinding or sieving of either ingredients or final blend, or both.

Meanwhile the business must support itself by attracting as much business as possible which usually involves a large number of small and medium sized jobs in a variety of different processes, formulations, sizes, labels, languages and variations. The inventory goes up, the variety goes up and the volume increases in pursuit of economies of scale that enable the business to win by being price competitive.

The customers who seem to be coming through with orders as their business develops are often the ones that bring additional variants as they seek to expand into new markets with new formulations or different presentations in response to their customers’ requests. These are often small, experimental, time consuming development or range extension jobs that consume many hours of management time and attention and only occasionally result in profitable growth.But can you say no?

Some of these simple jobs can be adequately monitored by physical tests that the operators can be trained to undertake and some can be sampled and analysed by contract laboratories. Apart from the cost the biggest drawback of using an outside laboratory is the time it takes to submit, analyse and receive the results. In the meantime you need to get on with packing. Sometimes you are prepared to wait, but the customer is often impatient. Sometimes you take the risk and pack anyway. How much better to have your own laboratory resource? Better still that the lab generates business of its own by developing formulations for the business or its clients. This tends to bring more variations as ideas cross-fertilize and problems are solved by changing ingredients and processes.

Meanwhile the simple product may need to be packed in suitable packaging to satisfy the safety requirements for the end use market or for the transportation to the market. Maybe the product needs to use UN approved packaging. If it does, is the packaging approved for this particular product and is it acceptable for the mode of transport envisaged? Road, sea and air are not all equal.It is the manufacturer who despatches the goods that carries the responsibility for the correct use of the packaging and for the documentation for transport. It is a little less simple to ensure that the person negotiating the order, purchasing the packaging, specifying the label, completing the despatch documentation is aware of the various requirements that applies to some, but not all of the simple mixes and packs.

The packing operation itself presents additional opportunities for variation depending on the type of filling that is required, the type of closure or seal, the accuracy of fill, batch marking, any other checks required and the the evidence of the checks being completed.

The nature of the product may also impact on the filling as a result of the frothiness, gloopiness, or tendency to separate for liquids or the dustiness, or ease and consistency of flow of a solid fill. The dusty and “flows like water” powder fills are often the worst to handle.

The actual despatch can be another matter again. To keep it simple the ideal contract is an ex works deal where responsibility passes at the factory gate. The customer usually expects us to load his transport nonetheless.

It gets less simple when the customer sends a shipping container and expects that to be loaded too. Filling a container single stacked with IBCs or nice uniform standard pallets with no “overhang” is fairly straightforward but ensuring that they don’t move in transit is not and believe me the biggest ships can be thrown about like corks in a trans-oceanic crossing. Having the right materials for securing the load inside the container and the expertise to use it is not so simple. In addition, the selection of an appropriate pallet needs to start at the design stage to ensure that there is no overhang preventing the requisite number from being loaded and also that the wood is appropriately treated so that it does not cause insect damage to another continent’s forests. Then there is the additional requirement for hazard labels for hazardous goods which is complicated further for shipments to the US which will require additional homeland security checks to be made plus the location of the hazard labels where they can be seen at all points of the journey and so must be located at a height that requires a ladder and the requisite health and safety provision for working at height in order to apply the labels. Finally the container is closed and sealed (twice for the US) but it is important to apply the seals in a way the prevents criminals from surreptitiously opening them using acid.

Then there is “known consignor” status which is another ball game altogether.

All very simple! Huh.

This week has been hard too. Coming up to a Bank Holiday weekend is always the same. Everyone wants Monday’s work done by the Friday and then they also expect 5 days work done in four days.

Good news though, all the Supervisors are back but I am a bit concerned at how easily mechanical genius gets out of breath. He has been on good form this week. Process Supervisor’s father-in law has died so no more stress there until the funeral. The lab technician saga has turned out Ok. He did get some medical advice, stayed away for two days and told his parents. They have given the bad guy some stick and we are back on an even keel.

The thick liquid production has proceed quite well with outputs above target. So far so good! The customer seems to be pleased.

The re-labelling jobs have proceeded to plan and the customers seem to be reasonably happy, although they always want it more quickly.

The granule filling job is disappointing because we didn’t get the last bit done this week even though the extra bottles arrived. Overall we completed 31 jobs out of 33!

The packing of a special organic fertiliser granule proved a bit of a problem when we found some of it damp and some of it mouldy. Bad news. I was not happy that we didn’t seem to know what is acceptable and what is not in this situation so I put everything on “hold” until the client came in to tell us what is good and what is bad. Perhaps we will get it written up so that in future we can make the judgement ourselves! How often will I need to nag for this I wonder?

Yesterday we had two shipping containers to load for Brazil with the heavy gloopy stuff. It eventually went OK but the labels didn’t arrive until the night before the despatch so we were hard pressed to get the IBCs labelled and marked in time for loading. It turns out that this was not a result of the customer’s failings but rather the problems that they had in getting the shipping line to confirm and supply details for the documents. I hope that this doesn’t become a regular thing when we are loading containers twice a week.

Come to think of it, most of the events this week have had a connection with transport problems. Apart from the usual fury about vehicles that turn up without booking in, or worse, without any paperwork to say what they are to collect or who their load belongs to! We had a carrier turn up to collect a load with paperwork but a vehicle too small to carry the six pallets. The same day we were advised that a pallet that we had loaded the day before was to be returned because someone had tried to unload it without removing the straps from the vehicle and had consequently damaged all three drums. We managed to re-drum and re-label and re-palletise all three and re-despatch the same day. Heroic stuff but it puts pressure on everyone and jeopardises other production work.

Today we were the cause of problems to the haulier who had arrived early to make a collection for Holland and then arranged to return at noon when we said we would be ready with seven IBCs. But we weren’t, by about two hours! By this time the haulier had decided to come back on Tuesday so we had missed our target and let our customer down. He was remarkably accommodating about it. Worse is the fact that the batch we were late in making is out of specification and just now I don’t know why!

To give credit where it is due, our regular carrier for the hub and spoke pallet system has been giving exemplary service lately.

Yesterday there was focus on the packing of more of the packs of fragrance for public toilets. Some office staff stayed late the night before to get boxes folded so that there would be less chance of missing the delivery deadline. We made it but I’m not sure what the productivity figures look like. Furthermore we are now told by the client that because their client has set an unreasonably tight (and previously unspecified) deadline the work will be given to someone else to do because they have the capacity to produce in 2 days what will take us more than a week. That is the life of a contract packer! I wonder if they will actually keep their promise. Particularly as we are being asked to quote for inkjet coding the bottles before we send them to the new packer. This seems to be horribly expensive for the client even if it earns a few pounds for us.

Yesterday was also the day of an important client meeting and the monthly management meeting. The client meeting was encouraging with regard to the future prospects for sales of the client’s product and by extension work for us but the price that they are prepared to pay will be a long way short of what we would like to see for our efforts and possibly short of our “walk away point”. And this is a business that we have spent seven years helping to develop!

The management meeting was uneventful and morphed into a Director’s strategic review which only showed how much more we need to do to achieve the targets that we have set ourselves. We need to do so much on all fronts to make a difference. The business systems all need some adjustments to suit the changes to staff responsibilities and to the demand for better performance all round. If only I could get a response from Production equal to that which I got from the lab when I asked for a sample of a customer’s product to be made for despatch to France by 14:30. It was done by 14:00 even though Production didn’t deliver the materials until 11:00. Annoying when I asked for the materials at 08:30.

Tomorrow I need to be in at 06:00 to enable the new steel-work to be installed before next week.

It was a particularly hard week at the factory this week. So I thought I would get some of it out of my head and maybe look back at it in the future and see it in a different perspective.

Maybe, if I can find the time, I will do it regularly and maybe someone else will find it interesting.

I’m a 62 year old white guy and I’ve been trying to grow my business since I bought it in 2002. We mix powders and liquids and pack them for our customers who are mostly in the Agrochemical sector. At this time of year we are very busy because the sun comes out and farmers need stuff that our customers sell. Nobody carries stock if they can help it.

Our customers are mostly small businesses but some of them are selling the stuff that we make for them to big businesses and some of those are very big and pretty uncompromising when it comes to delivery. So delivery is important.

We have about thirty people working in the office and factory including a brilliant young chemist and his assistant who has just left school.

So why was this week so hard? Well firstly there was a lot to do. Our average week has 25 jobs in the plan and we manage to do about 95% of them. This week we had over 40 jobs and we managed to do 26 of them! You have to imagine me standing in a room with 40 people all shouting for their product at once. Meanwhile we started the week with one of the four shop-floor supervisors missing and finished with only one left.

In a small business every absent employee is a problem, which is one of the reasons I don’t take holidays, but the mechanical genius who handles our engineering went on holiday and then got sick. Our guy who runs the team who look after all the material movements and vehicle loadings and unloadings had some sort of altercation with a dog and went to hospital. Our recently appointed processing supervisor was called to the bedside of his dying father-in-law.

Against this background one of our customers is annoyed we have not finished the ten tonnes of a product that he needs us to re-label and re-pack so he can deliver it to his customer before it is too late for the crop. The customer overlooks the fact that his several changes of mind about exactly what we should do with the pack has delayed our start by a week. And we got the job finished and dispatched by noon on Friday.

Another customer has been calling two or three times per day about his re-labelling job which must be completed by the end of the week (or miss the crop deadline) while at the same telling me that he expects to make £1000 per pallet from the deal which will probably won’t make us much more than £100.

A powder blending job finished on Wednesday and the customer supplies his label details on Thursday by email requesting a photograph of the labelled product for his customer by return and dispatch to the customer on Friday. I compromise my standards over the details of his label which don’t comply with the new CLP labeling regulations because I’ve no time to teach the client his own business.

We complete the production and dispatch of a liquid product that a customer in Italy has been screaming for, including our design of the the new CLP compliant labels.

A granule repacking job for another client completed and shipped but as a result of inexperience by our sales staff this job had taken rather too long to finalise the packaging specification so is late and I needed to make a last minute design decision for the production of the pack label. I hope that the customer doesn’t have reason to disagree with my decision. The pack looks good so he probably won’t.

A liquid repacking job finished and is shipped to the customer’s customer and we hope it will not miss the crop deadline. A pity that the customer did not supply all of the labels that he should have done so we had to print more ourselves. A pity that we managed to lose two of the special bottles that we bought for the job and so I had to compromise my standards again by using a couple of bottles of a lower specification. It is unlikely to make a practical difference as the product should be used by the end of next week!

Thursday was a particularly stressful day because we were due to load a shipping container for the Philippines with 15 x 1000 litre IBCs of an unusually dense liquid that we have made for the customer. The loading was due to take place at 10:00 but the absence of the supervisor with the dog and fist problem meant that the labeling and final preparation of the IBCs was last minute. For reasons of economy the customer uses a 20 foot container for this shipment and this means that we need to load with a ramp. To do this we use the assistance of a helpful neighbour who carries the 15 IBCs to his site and loads to the container under our supervision. The bad news is that shortly after arriving at the neighbour’s site his trailer collapsed and one of the 15 IBCs is lying on its side with a crumpled undercarriage and a slow leakage of product onto the bed of the collapsed trailer. The thick dense liquid is an environmental hazard. Three hours later we had pumped the contents to a new IBC, topped up with a small amount of spare material, cleared up the spillage and completed the container loading, waving goodbye to the patient driver of the container.

That was the day that my wife agreed to transfer another large amount of our capital to support the business. She is not happy about this!

On Friday we completed the first of a small filling and packing job that involves assembling a refill pack of fragrance used in one of those machines that squirt perfume in public toilets. We understand that the particular pack is destined for a trial at Wimbledon so we hope that Andy Murray likes it. The customer has been very patient with our rather stumbling start of filling this product and I hope that we can work it up into a successful and profitable line. Certainly it will please the women on the packing line yesterday who were very keen to do more.

Friday also included a consultation with our local steel fabricator over the design and installation of a new platform and mixing vessel for making a lot more of the thick dense stuff to put into IBCs. Hence the need for more capital. We should have this new capacity installed by early June so we need to start the training of the process operators as soon as possible. In the absence of our bereaved process supervisor I made a start with a new guy for the 2000L mixing suite. At least this resulted in another batch made and we’re only 3 batches behind the plan!

One of the things that people in large companies and public services and especially government don’t seem to understand is the extent to which individual employees’ personal problems impact on the management and operation of small companies. The dramatic reduction in the supervision in the factory this week is an obvious example and the consequence in our ability to respond to the customer needs is equally obvious. Less evident is the potential for increased quality defects, hazards and injury. In this we appear to have been lucky, I say “appear” because although there have been no accidents or injuries to staff the quality issues may surface later. However a more obscure example arose yesterday when our excellent chemist brought to my attention a problem that he was dealing with concerning his young assistant.

Apparently on Thursday night this young guy had gone out for a drink with an associate from school. In the course of this drink the associate had spiked our lad’s drink with what he said was Diazepam. The result was that our technician had driven to work in an unfit state to drive or work. Our first concern was for the lad’s health and safety, that he should not be asked to undertake any work that would hazard his or others’ safety and that he should not drive home.

He was taken home but we won’t know whether or not he got any medical attention or reported the crime to the Police or even if he will return to work until Monday.

Well that’s the mind dump finished. Perhaps that is what a blog is for!