Operations Gerrit Bancroft, Senior Site Operations Manager
What is happening in operations this time of the year? We have a lot going on right now although the shipping numbers we all look at would suggest otherwise. Procurement spends a lot of time during these couple of months preparing for the spring season. They also are spending a lot of time with licensing our new products. They must work with the states individually to make sure they meet all their requirements in submitting analysis and meeting all the marketing phrasing requirements. These tend to be more strict states in the west coast. Logistics works on many things this time of year as well. We have been working to find the right equipment for the drivers to keep their logs and communicate with the office staff. The equipment we used to have was not very user friendly and didn’t work as a good tool. We started working on next year’s budgets as well. Oh the fun of budgets, with the early planning it provides one less thing to worry about late spring. Then we move to the facilities group. This year we have a lot of projects going as we do every year but a few big projects are winding down. The
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seemingly never ending Stockton project is reaching near its end with some programing and troubleshooting left to do, but the majority is done. Now begins the training so that we can start reaping the benefits of the transportation savings. Goodland is finishing up this new rail manifold which will greatly help the team in processing rail cars. The hope is that we would have the ability to unload 20 cars in one day. The Carrington project is going very well, the tanks are all set in their containment and the building should be done on the exterior by the end of the month. We will then begin plumbing and installing load out equipment. The sites have many things going on as well. I had written an article a while back about the importance of maintenance. Well for AgroLiquid a lot of that maintenance happens this time of year, as well as starting to manufacture product for the spring season. Transportation staff works diligently at finding “for hire” work to keep our trucks busy. They have found since we started that finding “for hire” work can be more time consuming then trying to schedule fertilizer loads.
Internal Newsletter December 2016