Our Jianping site grows in line with sales demand

 Close monitoring of the foundry market in China has helped our plant in Jianping develop and roll out an expansion plan that has seen sales growth over a challenging period.

Changes at our bentonite plant in Jianping include a larger warehouse and upgraded dryer, which have enabled the team to produce and stock more product – leading to a significant sales uplift this year.

Fiona Yang, China Country Leader, explains: “Our plant capacity meant we were not able to process our products as quickly as we would like. We are a volume-based business, so we needed to enlarge the warehouse so that we could adjust our stock up to the level of growing sales.”

A data-based plan for growth

In 2018, the team started making technical calculations about the capacity of all its processes and last year put together an expansion plan. The expansion of the warehouse began straight away, continuing through to early 2020. Drying capacity was the bottleneck among all processes before the expansion, so the #1 dryer has been upgraded, doubling its capacity in Q1 of 2020; in tandem, the goods warehouse has been expanded to cater for this extra finished product.

“These changes have allowed us to be more productive and efficient, especially from the dryer improvements.” says Fiona “ This is all important for customer-centricity. We need to be proactive to interact with our customers’ requirements in lead time and stable quality.”

The improvements are ongoing. This includes a newly acquired mine with potential resources that will serve the site’s key markets. 

Additional developments are planned for 2020 and 2021, to get even closer to our markets and our customers,” concludes Fiona. “We have to prepare well to win all the new opportunities that will come our way.”