January/February 2018
Chemical Distribution
Brenntag aims for the right blend
B ULK D ISTRIBUTOR
3
Brenntag UK & Ireland opened a new state of the art blending facility in Lutterworth in November. Bulk Distributor caught up
with the company’s Russel Argo and Richard Ward to find out more
Tell us more about the blending solutions infrastructure and
services in the UK & Ireland
Russel Argo: “Our blending solutions business is one that’s grown
substantially over the course of the past 10 years. Today, we’re
operating from nine separate locations in the UK and Ireland and
each of those locations provides a particular specialism which we
think is important to the market. Brenntag is able to offer products
to customers in all sorts of ranges of delivery sizes from 28 tonne
bulk tankers loads right down to five litre packs and any of the
products that we offer can be either to customer own formulations
or to our own off-the-shelf formulations for different industry
sectors.
What difference is the Lutterworth site going to make?
“Lutterworth is our ninth facility of this type. It was a great
opportunity for us to invest in one of our larger and probably one
of the most futureproof sites, to start adding more value to
customers, particularly in that region but to also add some new
capabilities into our offering. The evolution of our blending business
has been in the more traditionally industrial bases in the north of
England and the UK. So the location of the site in Lutterworth,
which is right in the middle of England, gives us a really strong base
from which to grow our business throughout the midlands and
further into the south, particularly in the London area.
The site is smack in the middle with location ability for the M1,
M6, M5 and A14 highways, so really we can deliver logistically from
there better than we can from any other location in the UK.
Lutterworth is about a good a place as you can get.
Operationally it’s brought you further south, tell us about
the footprint.
RA: “That’s a good question because traditionally, a lot of our
blending capabilities were in the north of the UK and Ireland. We
have recognised that clearly there is a cost to logistics and a cost to
distribution. So the location of Lutterworth is a perfect situation for
us to start offering all of these added value services to the whole of
the UK now with the right level of cost base behind us and I’m very
excited about the possibilities that this gives us.
Flexibility is one of the added value factors. What new
capabilities does Brenntag Lutterworth bring?
Richard Ward: “The new blending tanks that we’ve put in place are
larger than some of the others we have operated before. That gives
us better batch and quality control, in particular to give a much
finer finished product for the customer. It also allows us to make
blends that we weren’t actually able to make before in other
location and so we’re adding new products onto our portfolio. I
think the great thing about the Lutterworth facility is the flexibility it
gives us to move from manufacturing customer’s own formulations
to also offering our own off-the-shelf formulations into certain
industry sector s.
How important is the quality side to it? How will you
maintain that with this big operation?
RW: “The industries that we supply demand a high quality of
products and of operation. We have invested in additional
laboratory and quality control equipment in the site as well to back
up the investment in the manufacturing plant. The feedback we’ve
had from of our customers so far is that we’ve made the right level
of technical investment which will enable them to buy from us in
confidence.
How have you go about the whole project of building this
impressive facility
RW: “The great thing is that we’ve actually designed and built it
from scratch – it’s not a modification of an existing plant. It’s been
designed from the ground up to do exactly what we want it to do.
And that design essentially came from the research that we carried
out in the market, asking our customers – as well as our suppliers -
what they expected from us and what they would like us to provide.
Using that feedback enabled us to design the highest quality, state
of the art facility which we think will give us strong growth from
now and into the future.”
You said you can offer customers a combination of product
made directly in Lutterworth or you can make things closer to
them – how does that work?
RW: “Each of our blending facilities has a particular specialisation,
so when we are making more complex, multicomponent blends for
customers, we can make several of the different blends in different
locations, then bring them together in one central location which
could be much closer to where the customer is. We use the benefits
of Brenntag scale in terms of raw material purchases, also in terms
of asset and infrastructure investment to bring things together in
one location to offer that product to the customer and that has
proved to be very successful so far.”
How important is that flexibility, that focus?
RW: “We think that that is one of the key things that differentiates
Brenntag from the competition - that is the absolute added value
we can bring so attention to detail and an understanding that a
customer needs to be looked after on a local basis through our local
network as well as having access to all of the strengths and benefits
that being part of a global organisation brings, so that combination
of offering and skills is probably one of the key things to Brenntag’s
success.”
What feedback are you getting from customers, what are
they telling you, why do they like to stay with you?
RA: “Customers enjoy talking to somebody that they recognise as
having their interests at heart. I think that’s an important factor
Continued on page 4
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What about the range in terms offerings and customer
reach?
RA: “The great thing about Brenntag, as a business whole and not
just the blending solutions, is that we can offer customers product
from a 28 tonne road tanker, right down to a 10 litre pack, so it’s
the full range of products and pack sizes - all from one phone call,
to one location, to one account manager and that’s been a great
strength of the growth of our business in recent years. I think that
this complexity of offering will enable customers to continue to buy
from us in future and also talk to us more in partnership about
some of their non-core activities which perhaps they would want to
outsource to a company like Brenntag where we have made this
long term large investment.”
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