Nagraj Bokinkere, Technical Director of Kodak’s Specialty Chemicals (KSC) business, was a featured speaker at the 3rd annual Chemicals America show for Agro, Specialty and Custom chemical companies, September 10 in Charleston, SC.
During a panel discussion entitled “Best Practices in Chemical Contract Manufacturing,” Dr. Bokinkere focused on the deployment of KSC’s multi-tiered quality system when providing scale to new materials, custom synthesis and toll manufacturing services to customers in the agrochem, pharmaceutical, personal care, security and electronics sectors.
“For nearly 70 years, we have embraced a rigorous quality system that has supplied products to FDA regulated businesses as well as consumer and electronics markets– all of which have their own unique, separate and sophisticated sets of requirements,” Dr. Bokinkere said. The pillars that support KSC’s “house of quality” include statistical process control, a rigorous change management process and design for manufacturing approaches. “We have one quality system that can accommodate the needs of many different businesses. It is built on a foundation of Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma practices,” Dr. Bokinkere said. “The scope of these resources gives us control in production, ensuring our customers of consistent, high quality products.”
“Because we interact within different industries, our quality system continues to evolve,” he said. “A strategic focus on continuous improvement across multiple markets helps ensure ‘reduction to practice’ throughout the process.” Because Specialty Chemical’s quality system was built on an imaging sciences platform, it is extraordinarily precise and very demanding, right down to understanding the impact of parts-per-million (ppm) levels of impurity, Dr. Bokinkere said.
“For example, a single part per million level of an impurity can take an image that is completely accurate to one that may have a significant color shift due to that single ppm discrepancy,” Dr. Bokinkere said. “Thus all the systems, the training, and the tools we have in place truly demonstrate our ability to make materials at the highest quality.”
Statistical Process Control tools serve as the “voice of the process,” Dr. Bokinkere said.
“If the process drifts below the control level, an alarm is sent to the operator,” he said. “We then employ every analytical tool available to us, such as our root cause investigation system to discover what the problem is; we solve the problem, and we institute corrective actions so the process comes back under control running in a more stable manner.”
Kodak Specialty Chemicals’ quality system is in place across a three-building manufacturing complex at Eastman Business Park in Rochester, NY. Each facility is set up in a bay concept – three reactors and one centrifuge in each bay – a total of 88 glass-lined and stainless steel reactor systems scaled from 22 liters to 3,780 liters to handle everything from pilot batches to multi-ton commercial quantities.
“Each cell operates as a single chemical factory, providing the flexibility to run several different processes in one plant at the same time – all with a high degree of solid isolation capability,” Bokinkere said.
“We offer a broad product portfolio that includes functional dyes, intermediates, complex organic products, specialty polymers and gelatins,” he said.
Kodak’s world class analytical testing resources support all program phases from R&D through manufacturing with many of Kodak’s analytical services offered for hire to external clients.
For information on the quality system and Kodak Specialty Chemicals, watch the video below and visit http://www.kodak.com/go/specialtychemicals or call Nagraj Bokinkere, at 1.585.722.9038, or email nagraj.bokinkere@kodak.com.