Launch of the Semi-Bulk “Carbo-Cannon.”

“When I first heard Mark Huling from Semi-Bulk tell me “…we can wet Carbopol in less than 30 seconds…”, I thought to myself “…yeah right…”  When I mentioned it to my Operations/Compounding folks, their responses were “…it will never work, it’s impossible, we’ve been doing this a long-time Matt – it’s bull, it’s smoke & mirrors, these guys are lying to you…” 

And then there’s Semi-Bulk’s claim “…you can reduce the amount of Carbopol needed because our equipment does a better job at functionalizing the Carbopol…  you can get to the same viscosity with less Carbopol”.  That claim made my R&D guy’s head spin for a few days and I had to listen to him tell me that in his 30+ years he’d never heard of such a thing.  Well – kudos to Mark and Semi-Bulk because not only does it work – it works every time, all the time!  Just as you said it would.  We have never been happier to have been wrong in our entire lives!

We have affectionately named your system the “Carbo-Cannon”.  Our compounders love it; our operations folks love it, and our GM of the facility loves it.  In terms of return on investment, our ROI on the Carbo-Cannon was 2-3 days.  I never thought about the ROI in terms of “# of compounders; dollars spent / time spent” wetting Carbopol caveman style like we used to do against the cost of the equipment.  I view the ROI in terms of us going from 4-5 batches a day to 14+; no longer needing 2 tanks/side-phase tank, thus not tying up 2 tanks/thus not having to clean two tanks.  Also our ability to execute additional batches in the tank we had freed up.  The revenue impact from the Carbo-Cannon was incredible and immediate.  It is not an exaggeration to say that the Carbo-Cannon paid for itself in 2-3 days if not quite literally day 1.

To stay with the caveman analogy – THANK YOU Mark and THANK YOU Semi-Bulk for helping us “discover fire”.

Matt Hewitt
InSpec Solutions