Presco 2015 a year in review, an operational perspective
Our Presco Engineered Film team brought on several new technologies and partnered with our customers and vendors to create solutions to a variety of goals and initiatives.
Sue Kenna, a chemical engineer, joined our research and development team mid-year to assist us in providing faster solutions to our customers. Sue brought with her over 20 years flexible PVC experience along with valuable field experience in pigments and other polymers. The combination of Dr. Stephen Hutcheson and Sue Kenna has proven to be an effective team to provide timely and valuable development work here at Presco.
In addition to personnel, we also increased our R&D testing capabilities both for polymer analysis and finished goods failure mode testing. R&D is now equipped with a new Braebender, two roll lab mill, MSHA flame testing chamber, spectrophotometry with formulation capabilities for reduced color matching turnaround times, and a RF welder to replicate downstream applications. Our initiative was and continues to be to better assist our customers with faster product development and improved downstream predictive failure analysis.
The production team added new technology and worked diligently on increasing operator technical skillsets. Our teams created and updated over 40 different written procedures to standardize work between operators and shifts. In conjunction with R&D the teams commercialized several new product lines and improved some existing ones. Improvements were made to the processing of films such as double polish clear used in mining applications along with clear FDA films used for medical fluid collection bags. This significantly increases productivity on these items by reducing the amount downtime created due to polymer degradation in our process.
Presco commercialized items like medical air mattress films, children’s nap pads, other inflatable medical products, certificate holders, shower curtains, movie screen and bookbinder films. While many of these items were already in our capabilities, Presco needed to improve our film and roll quality and packaging to meet various customer expectations. Production added equipment to improve online slitting of narrower webs, a first of its kind vacuum system to our largest extruder to extract volatiles and air entrainment making a cleaner sheet of film, new state of the art electrical drives to improve tension sensitive web handling for flatter films, and partnered with our die manufacturer to improve their latest dies that proved to make flatter films.
All of this new business also created the need to expand our production team to maintain the proposed lead times that acquired this business from the competition as we produced an additional million pounds of quality films.