OUTSOURCING a worthwhile resource

It might be a new year but the time of celebration is soon over, particularly for operators of process plants gearing themselves up to cope with the ravages of winter. Most plants are, of course, designed to cope with some abnormal weather or at least their operators think they are but things can go very wrong, very quickly. This happened to BP Chemicals last winter at its Grangemouth petrochemical complex when effective ambient temperatures dropped to -30 degrees C on occasions. Not a particular problem for the core ethylene and butadiene processes, but a major headache for the water demineralisation plant supplying the site's boilers.

As the temperature plummeted, output from the demin plant was greatly reduced as it was impossible to regenerate the ion exchange beds due to frozen pipes. The ethylene and butadiene manufacturing team were immediately faced with the possibility of dropping production levels by as much as 10 per cent, or around £400 000 worth of lost production. What BP needed, and urgently, was help.

One 'phone call was all that was needed for that help to arrive promptly not a knight in shining armour, nor the Lone Ranger on a white horse, but a gleaming white trailer full of shining ion exchange vessels, courtesy of Ecolochem International. 'As soon as Ecolochem arrived,' said Jane Stevenson, BP Chemical's manufacturer engineer, 'their ion exchange unit was linked to our demin plant and within a short time we had more than enough water for our processes.'

TRAILER FOR RENT ONLY

That trailer a 20ton juggernaut measuring 13.3m x 2.4m x 4m was one of Ecolohem's MobileFlow ion exchange units, but could just as easily have been kitted out for reverse osmosis duty as a MobileRO system.

Units like these are Ecolochem's instant answer to the sort of emergency experienced at Grangemouth. But they, or the equipment and technology they contain, can also fulfil the other important role that Ecolochem plays. This is as a provider of an outsourcing capability for companies no longer wanting to take in-house responsibility for its water treatment utility.

According to Mark Dyson, Ecolo- chem's corporate development manager for Europe and the Middle East, the emergency call-out service is just one of three services available from the privately-owned company headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia. The others cater for short-term demands from customers wanting, say, up to 12 months cover for 'planned emergencies' or production peaks; and longer term requirements of anything up to 15 years and more for customers looking to outsource their water treatment operations completely. The latter projects are generally handled by Ecolochem under build, own, operate and maintain (BOOM) contracts, with its customers only having to supply the raw water and plant services. Through discussions with the customer, Ecolochem will arrive at what it considers to be the best technical solution to deliver water of the desired quality and quantity.

Dyson places great emphasis on the service nature of Ecolochem's business. 'We are purely a service operation,' he says. 'We don't sell equipment. Our operators are told that they sell to the customers every day in the service they provide.' All those operators are graduate engineers, either recruited locally in the many countries serviced by Ecolochem, or at least multilingual. The same applies to that all-important other end of the company's business, its response centre for emergency calls. 'There is always someone at the end of the 'phone. That's critical,' Dyson explains. 'Outside of normal business hours, calls are directed to our worldwide despatch centre.

For Dyson's area of responsibility, the hub is at the company's UK headquarters in Peterborough, from where trailers are despatched on 'a first come, first served basis'. Careful juggling of equipment resources between Ecolochem's three main types of business, however, ensures that emergency response time is effectively 'freight time'. The company does have depots at strategic sites throughout Europe, but response is nearly always available out of the Peterborough site.

Faced with the sort of emergency experienced by BP last year, most process companies would have few qualms about picking up the 'phone to call for emergency cover. But choosing to outsource completely a basic utility like water treatment clearly calls for some detailed analysis of the pros and cons before any decision is made.

Dyson believes that, whatever the utility to be outsourced, a company needs to make a comparison between operating and purchasing a system themselves, or outsourcing it to a specialist. 'Each evaluation will be unique,' he says, 'and must be conducted on a case by case basis. With a service contract, costs are spelt out clearly in the service contract. True costs can therefore be predicted, which is not necessarily the case if you own and operate your own system.'

Apart from economic factors, a company considering outsourcing should build up a rapport with the service company so that a level of trust can be arrived at.