My yesterday`s chat with my friend and former Henkel colleague Gerd Bösemann

Hello here again in my blog all You faithful readers of my daily posts. I am seriously quite sure, that this has to do with the global warming up and climate change, but it is not a lie if I tell You, that since I started with working in my home office, immediately after the return from my french language intensive training in Paris in the middle of March, I can hardly count more than 4 days with "bad" weather, means with rain and lower temperatures. Actually we are here amidst winter now. But nothing indicates this. In the contrary, the weather is more like summer since 4 months and so far no change of this has been predicted.

I mean, I personally love these sunny, warm and dry days. And for the refurbishment of my house and garden areas which are continuing still, this is a present from heaven. But seen from a general and global climate standpoint, it starts to really worry me. 

Yesterday I had a chat with my friend and former colleague at Henkel`s Corporate Engineering Department (this doesn`t exist any longer) Gerd Bösemann, who still lives on the outskirts of Düsseldorf with his lovely familly. Gerd is an excellent process engineering specialist and from 1989 until my departure to Sao Paulo in June 1996 we have been working jointly upon several capital investment projects for Henkel`s detergent and chemical divisions over there in Germany, for which I had been named as Project Manager and where Gerd was the Lead Process Engineer in our project teams. 

Of the multiple projects for the extension, optimisation, transfer and new built of production plants for Henkel`s different consumer and B2B products, the installation and start up of the completely new huge factory for the production and filling of all liquid detergents and household cleaners for the European markets was the most spectacular one. 

On the picture in the lower right corner, You can see my friend and former colleague Gerd Bösemann on the front end of the table. On the picture on the lower left corner I am together with Dr. Gruber, my former boss during my time as Technical Manager at Schwarzkopf & Henkel`s very big flagship plant for hair colorants in Viersen-Dülken, Germany, where he was the Managing Director and where I took over responsability for all engineering, maintenance and general technical services.

Immediately after the fall of the wall in Berlin, Henkel had been reawarded for a symbolic prize its, besides the main factory in Düsseldorf, second biggest and second oldest detergent factory in Genthin in the eastern - former communist - German state of Saxony-Anhalt. And satisfying the massive respective expectations of the politics and local public, Henkel decided to do some massive investments and create lots of new jobs over there.

The first big investment project, which a group of colleagues from my department executed, was the installation of a completely new detergent powder plant incl. spray tower and all other necessary production, filling and packaging processes.

When this powder detergent project had already advanced for more than a year, I had been named as Project Manager for the construction, the transfer of the manufacture of all these products from the manufacturing plants at our factory in Düsseldorf and some other places to Genthin and for the start up of the new big liquid detergents and household cleaners plant on the greenfield there.

The total investment for the new factory was about 80 million D-Marks (the Euro just became introduced as the new currency in Germany and the other EU countries from 2005 on) and thus this was one of Henkel`s major capital investments at that time.

During my yesterday`s chat with him, Gerd confirmed to me that the technology which we had developped for large scale industrial utilisation at that time, still continues state-of-the-art. Actually the idea behind the construction of this factory was, to combine several exciting new technologies and create a completely new manufacturing, filling and packaging process for this kind of large volume products. 

You must imagine, that such products are beeing produced and sold in very high numbers. I don`t remember the figures well, but I would guess, that we easily produced about 200 million finished goods units there per year for the different markets all over Europe and - some of them also for international exportation. 

The core of the new mixing technology were completely new, highly sensored and automised "continuous mixing" machines with series of interconnected dosing pumps, in-line mixers and several heating and cooling steps. This new technology substituted completely and thus revolutionised the so far common state-of-the-art "batch mixing" technology for these products.

And on the filling process side for these products also completely new technical concepts had been chosen. Our dream since long years had been, to "in-line" mix and fill these products, practically without intermediate storage and buffers for both products and packaging. In the case of the packaging this meant the "in-line" blowing (PE)  resp. thermoforming (PET) of the huge quantities of bottles needed. But for sure this did not really work without any at least small storage buffers in order to protect the processes against unplanned stoppages and interruptions. 

In fact - due to the high variety of the different products and also of the primary packaging items and because of the very high volume of production of these - the whole technology was very complex and had to fullfil the highest requirements regarding efficiency, productivity and reliabilty. 

Gerd and I, together with all other project team members and our colleagues from the Central Detergents Technology and Application Engineering Departments at Henkel`s HQ and main factory in Düsseldorf, Germany, discovered and developped all these new technologies in all details in extremely close cooperation with our suppliers for this kind of machinery and equipment. 

The installation of the whole factory - from the first foundation works on until the oficial closure of the project, the handing over to the "owners" and the public inauguration took us a little more than 2 years time. 

To be very frank and sincere - all kinds of shit and bad surprises, which You can imagine, had happened during this time. We altogether were often very desperate and we suffered lots of backslashes during all the time. But in the end we found solutions for all problems and made the whole project a real success.

The most exciting experience for me during the next years was, to pick up bottles of the products from "our" factory in Genthin in the shops and look up the manufacturing codes, where we - as insiders - could discover on which of our filling lines these products had been manufactured and at which dates and hours. 

From the beginning of this incredible project on I flew from Düsseldorf,  where I had my office, to Berlin, Tegel airport, almost every week and drove from there through the big, beautiful forrests all the way through Potsdam and Brandenburg to Genthin. Those were the crazy times in the first years after the fall of the Berlin wall. All the centuries old prussian army barracks along my way through the forrests were still full with Russian soldiers, which started to leave Germany for home. I met many of them - and also their civilian companions and familly members - along the roads, where they were selling their uniforms and whatelse You can imagine, for making some real money before beeing packed on days long military trains home to their own country. 

After the project in Genthin I got started on new projects in Manchester, UK, and in Belvedere, in the south of London, and Gerd joined teams for other projects within the Henkel world. Thus we never worked together again from then on, but - for sure - our friendship continued and whenever I needed help for solving difficult process technology questions, I called him. 

In June 1996 I left Düsseldorf for getting started on my new function as Project & Engineering Department Manager at Henkel`s chemical plant in Jacarei, Sao Paulo, Brasil, which later-on became Cognis and now belongs to BASF. Thus another important development step for my life and career started. 

Since then, Gerd and I have met again only once - upon the wonderful party night, to which I had invited lots of  my friends and former Henkel colleagues on ocasion of my 2nd marriage in January 2004 in the famous bar & restaurant "Uerige" in the "Altstadt" of Düsseldorf. Believe me - we had fun there. 

As You can see, although I only had really worked as a detail engineer during the very first few years of my professional career, technology and industry have always been part of my interest and today as President of Vulkan do Brasil, we attend many of our industrial customers like in mining, iron & steel, cement, paper & pulp, sugar and many other industries with our great portfolio of all kinds of mechanical power transmission components and I personally find myself confronted there with lots of technologies, processes and machinery, with which I have somehow made own practical experience during my former career steps. Maybe this is the reason, why I am so much passionate about our business and service for our worldwide customers.

Hope You found this interesting. Looking forward to meeting with You here again tomorrow in my blog.