PHOTO: The Serioplast management team – Kelvin Mills (centre), managing director of Serioplast SA, with Sarah Soothoane, logistics manager, Justin Mokwatlo, QC manager, Leigh Fitzpatrick, administration manager, and Willem Slabbert, production and technical manager, with one of the company’s Seriomac machines at the new plant in Boksburg
THE new Serioplast plant in Johannesburg has gone into production in close to record time. After the Italian group won the ‘Operation Waterfall’ tender process conducted by Unilever South Africa, contracts were signed in October 2013 and – just 12 months later – the company went into production in October last year.
That is arguably one of the fastest-to-market greenfields projects in the local plastics converting sectors to date. Containers produced at Serioplast plant are still being transported to the Unilever site in Boksburg, as opposed to supply ‘through-the-wall’ to the filling and capping plant next door. And we are talking about serious volumes here, something like 420,000 containers a day.
The Boksburg plant is involved in extrusion blow moulding, preform injection and injection stretch blow moulding for the production of polyolefin and PET containers. It also handles the labelling of the containers on an in-line basis, with a high level of automation throughout the plant. It is not involved in closure production, with all caps going direct to the Unilever plant where filling takes place.
Many in the industry doubted the ability of European convertors to be competitive with the SA blow moulding groups, possibly due to the potentially high set-up costs as well as lack of local market knowledge, but with Serioplast, it’s becoming apparent that their systems are extremely efficient and they have gotten through the set-up phase in record time.
A family business from Bergamo north of Milan, in the foothills of the Alps, Serioplast has been in operation since 1974. It main recipe appears to be that of closely supporting brand companies and setting up satellite plants in the close proximity of the brand groups’ filling and logistics plants.
By comparison, the South African blow moulding businesses have attempted to do this in several instances, but appear to have been unable to work as closely with the brand groups. If anything, the brand groups have played the SA convertors off against each other, leading to erosion of margins for the convertors and at times destructive levels of competition.
Serioplast’s advantage appears to be its ability to apply its plant blueprint to achieve maximum productivity in the shortest possible time, on a virtual ‘plug-and-play’ basis. The setup of the new plant in Boksburg followed exactly the course designed, with some minor changes – which are in fact improvements, and which could potentially be used the Serioplast draughtsmen for future development. The group is at present setting up a plant in Cairo as well, and the layout is likely to be very similar if not identical.
A further major advantage for Serioplast is that it builds its own machines: its subsidiary SerioMac builds extrusion-blow moulding machines that we understand are on a par with anything on the market. There is also a clear financial advantage in this strategy, with the plus that machine R+D and technology development is on-going at SerioMac, resulting in ready access to highly productive equipment.
And probably the cap on top for the local initiative was the appointment of Kelvin Mills to head up the SA operation. Originally in the blow moulding sector, Mills spent an extended period in the machine supply sector where he achieved success particularly in the ISBM area. Mills was able to use his experience of local conditions in cooperation with the Italian plant designers, which led to some changes in the plant configuration.
The result is that Serioplast is employing an entirely South African team at its Boksburg, with only occasional visitations from Italy.
www.serioplast.com