This has been an exciting year for our organization. In my tenure at LSPI, I have seen the business transition in a myriad of ways, while continuing to grow and mature. As we debuted as an independent entity this year, we further strengthened our identity. In this issue, we want to highlight how LSPI’s culture focuses on being a premier employer, an industry educator and a good neighbor.
LSPI’s Chief Financial Officer, Darren Wyatt, was named a finalist at the Houston Business Journal’s CFO of the Year awards. His contributions as CFO are enhanced by his extensive commercial background, and he has over 20 years of career experience in finance roles. Darren’s breadth of experience provides a solid foundation and an effective bridge between his financial, strategic and operating responsibilities.
Recognizing LSPI’s outstanding safety record and dedication to our employees’ health and safety, Texas Mutual awarded LSPI with a Platinum Safety Partner Award. This award is only presented to a small percentage of policyholders with proven safety records who exceed industry safety standards and demonstrate leadership.
The Business Marketing Association (BMA) of Houston recognized LSPI with two Awards of Excellence for our corporate logo identity and re-branding campaign. BMA’s premier awards program highlights top-quality creative and strategic business-to-business marketing communications elements.
LSPI’s corporate logo was also named a Crystal Award finalist by the American Marketing Association (AMA).
As the business has grown, LSPI determined that an improved and expanded distribution and delivery service plan was necessary to best serve Canadian customers. In late 2016, LSPI established a new transportation relationship with a Canadian partner to meet this need. This partner’s main business is to provide logistics services, typically for oilfield chemicals companies. They operate an extensive fleet of transport trucks based out of a large drive-in, heated warehouse in the Edmonton, Alberta area. Dedicated specific warehouse space, equipment, and drivers have been allocated for LSPI customer support. This dedicated fleet ensures that Canadian DRA customers are serviced reliably to full LSPI operating standards. All drivers must comply with local government and industry regulation and meet LSPI’s comprehensive training and service requirements.
This Canadian transportation partnership has also enabled the adoption of rail transport of DRA to Canada. Railcars of DRA are delivered to an unloading yard, only a few miles from the warehouse. Future plans will allow rail deliveries to move directly from LSPI’s Bryan manufacturing campus to our Canadian partner’s warehouse for unloading and storage.
LSPI is the largest manufacturer of pipeline DRA, under strict quality standards. As LSPI continues to grow and invest in our business, we are pleased to announce that we are building a new manufacturing plant which will produce crude and refined product DRA. With the addition of the new plant, LSPI will have manufacturing capacity in excess of global demand for drag reducing agents.
This new plant will be located next to our existing facility in Bryan, Texas, and is expected to be fully operational by the end of 2017. Each plant will operate independently and while leveraging administration and management, will have its own day to day operational staff. As a result of this added capability, customers will experience increased supply reliability through production capacity redundancy for current and future DRA needs. LSPI will also have more flexibility to develop, test and commercialize industry-leading technologies to offer to our customers.
LSPI’s Bryan, Texas, facilities are part of a 36-acre, world-class manufacturing campus capable of producing and shipping product to customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week. LSPI is certified to ISO 9001:2015 quality standards.
LSPI’s management team has committed to proactively enhancing safety procedures by forming an Emergency Response Team (ERT). Bryan, Texas, is fortunate to have great local fire and emergency responders, but these crews lack the knowledge that LSPI manufacturing employees possess in regards to plant operations.
The team is Pro-board Certified (certification for fire service personnel to national firefighting standards) in industrial exterior firefighting and training on incipient interior fire response. Training is conducted annually at the TEEX Fire Training School (College Station, Texas) to ensure that the latest firefighting techniques and safety precautions are utilized.
The LSPI Manufacturing ERT team is working with the Bryan Fire Department to help supplement their ranks by completing electrical isolations, valving out lines and knowing which chemicals are the ones of concern during an emergency. Training is conducted regularly, and procedures are reviewed thoroughly for safety standards, compliance and best practices.
Establishment of the ERT on LSPI’s Bryan manufacturing campus ensures that on-site personnel are prepared to counter emergencies that may include personal safety situations, as well as facility-threatening events requiring active firefighting capabilities. The ERT works in full collaboration with local authorities for all training and procedure development.
In North America, LSPI has a large number of full time employees dedicated to maintaining our network of injection skids. In the first 6-months of 2017, this team has logged over 200,000 driving miles and completed over 500 skid preventative maintenance visits.
Will Miles is the latest addition to our Field Service Representative (FSR) network. Will joined the FSR team in November of 2016 to help manage our skid network on the east coast. Will has been working with LSPI since 2010, when he joined us as a plant operator. Since then, Will has had roles as a skid fabrication coordinator, and in doing site assessments for our transportation group. What a great background for field service! We were happy to see Will continue his career with LSPI, taking on these new responsibilities. Will replaced Phil Ellis upon his retirement after over 30 years of service. When not on the job, Will enjoys getting in a round of golf and following the Atlanta Braves come baseball season.
Search