Home plant advantage

In any relationship between a chemical plant and a potential customer, there is always the inevitable plant visit. Half inspection, half courtship, it is a great opportunity to show off a sparkling chemical manufacturing facility and make a good impression on people you hope to be working with for a very long time.

It makes perfect sense from the perspective of a customer – if you’re counting on a facility to enable your multi-million dollar project, you’re probably going to want to actually see the place where your precious chemical is being made and meet the people that you will be spending the next year working with.

I’ve hosted quite a number of these visits, which I tend to frame with narratives and emotions. I like to tell the story of our plant and our people, starting from our humble beginnings with our founder and his dream, and then inviting the customer to meet our great chemists and our excellent manufacturing team. Better than simply saying ‘we can do it!’, you want to show it. It’s an opportunity to demonstrate to a potential customer that you have the facilities and the skilled staff that can deliver the chemicals they need on time and with excellent quality.

After arranging a date where the customer can find time to visit and all the key personnel are in place, you can begin preparing your team. Send out emails reminding both the laboratory and plant staff that a customer is coming, and that they need to do a bit more tidying than normal – perhaps it’s a good opportunity to wipe down those hood sashes and remove all proprietary data from their benchtops. The plant is typically clean and organised, but it never hurts to remind people.

On the day

The day of the visit is a bit rushed, as most out-of-town guests will show up in the morning. You typically have just an hour or two for last-minute preparations. A wise host will walk through the plant and make sure there aren’t any mop buckets left in the middle of the plant floor, or another customer’s batch record lying out in the open. It’s also good to take a whiff or two to make sure that there isn’t any particularly stinky chemistry being performed.

When your guests arrive, you and your team can be present to greet them at the door and shake their hands. It’s always fun to meet people when you’ve only been communicating via email and teleconferences. After a quick set of introductions and the discussions of the various products and projects in question, it’s time for the plant tour. It’s good to have a short safety brief and to hand out hard hats and protective glasses.

It is always a joy to show off a well-appointed chemical plant to visitors. Those who are new to the manufacturing world will marvel at the size of the containers (yes! that is an enormous container of bromine!) and the reactors (taller than a pretty tall person!) Very experienced customers will often make astute comments about your reactor systems, ask to see the maintenance records or will casually ask questions of the operators to see if they actually perform their jobs as written in the standard operating procedures.

You should feel like you understand your customers better

After you return to the safe confines of the conference room, it’s time to get down to the details of the proposed chemistry at hand. Even in a really thorough project summary, there are little details that don’t occur to you to write down in an email or ask during a busy Microsoft Teams call. But at the end of an in-person discussion of a complex project, you might slip in questions that you’ve been wondering about (what is the brand of the n-butyllithium that you folks used? Have you tried alternate suppliers?) or a proposal that you’d like the customer to consider. ‘Rather than having us ship this horrifically goopy liquid, how about we do the next step and ship you a nice white solid instead? Sure, it might cost you a little bit of money, but we can definitely perform the next step well.’

After a long day of tours and meetings, it’s always great to treat your guests to dinner. A good meal and a drink or two provides a nice opportunity to get to know one another and summarise the main points of the potential project. At the end of the night, you should feel like you understand your customers better and they’ve gained confidence that you’re the right partner to help them be successful. You can wish them well and a safe trip home, and invite them to come back to your plant to see their chemicals being made.