Brandon Seiler

Lab Technician

Location: IC, Vernon Hills
Nominator: Johnny McMaster

Lesson Learned #7: Winning at Oil-Dri is a Team Game!

Since 2020 our primary supplier of sodium bentonite, Wyo-Ben, has started selling their own Cat Litter Formulations directly to retailers like PetSmart and Target instead of only selling bulk commodity. As they’ve continued to grow the Wyo-Ben PET business, their capacity available for commodity sales has declined. Wyo-Ben purchased MI-Swaco’s Magnet Cove facility in late 2023 to grow their total capacity available for both Wyo-Beb PET retail and commodity sales. In addition, Wyo-Ben PET opened a 2nd packaging location in Toronto to grow their cat litter business. With the Magnet Cove acquisition, Wyo-Ben made a strategic decision to move all commodity business to this new facility leaving their Lucerne facility dedicated to their PET business. The Lucerne facility has been the primary supplier to Oil Dri for the past decade. In early 2024 we received samples from the Magnet Cove facility which were like all previous samples tested at the IC from MI-Swaco as the product performance fell below the clump strength and dust index requirements making this material unqualified to purchase. As Wyo-Ben started to cut off all commodity customers out of Lucerne they were only able to give us 2-3 rail cars per week while we needed to have a minimum supply of 7-8 rail cars each week to cover customer demand of 42,000 annual tons. Due to this, we went into an out-of-stock situation where we had to push back all promotions for items containing sodium bentonite and had to put each plant on allocation. Brandon was then assigned as a project lead at the IC to find a solution to qualify a new sodium bentonite supply and to also determine which formulas can be changed to reduce our consumption while maintaining performance requirements.

Brandon began testing material from smaller suppliers like Lonestar Barite, Teague Minerals, and Genus Bioenergy to help us determine if there are any immediate orders we can place with new vendors to help improve our supply. In addition to testing those suppliers he also wanted to revisit the Magnet Cove material to determine how we can modify our formulas to start using this material. As part of that work, he decided to use the IC Team including Monika, Nick, and Chris for help. He made lab samples of the Magnet Cove Bentonite and asked Chris to have his 2 cats, Birch and Lily use this material over the weekend so he can compare the results with his previous results. On Monday, May 6th Chris informed Brandon that the material was excellent in terms of clump strength and seemed better than our current supply. Brandon and Monika immediately went to work to find out why in-home testing yielded different results from the lab. They started by making a tweak to the concentration of ammonium ion in our synthetic urine which greatly improved the clump strength results, aligning them closely with the in-home results. For example, the 80/20 formula went from a clump strength of 36% to 97%. The raw bentonite went from a clump strength of 75% to a passing clump strength of 98%. The IC then approved ordering from Magnet Cove for all plants and formulations. On May 6th we had a total of 23 railcars in the pipeline. In just over 2 months we’ve been able to increase our total pipeline up to 68 railcars and put Oil Dri in a very healthy position going into the start of our next FY and winter build. All plants are now off allocation and can support promotions and all customer orders.

To help with the short-term orders from Magnet Cove Brandon also revised our 65/35 Lightweight Formulations to a 62.5/37.5 formulations at Blue Mountain and Georgia. In the 2 months of production data collected after this change there have been 0 instances of the plants not meeting the fill weight requirements or drop-in run rates. In addition, all Quality Requirements have been met. If this formula becomes the new formula for the long-term at each plant, it will result in a saving of $2.65/ton at Blue Mountain and $7.78 per ton at Georgia for Lightweight. Blue Mountain has a forecast of 21,690 lightweight tons equaling an annual savings of $57,478.50 while Georgia has a forecast of 13,806 lightweight tons equaling an annual savings of $107,410.68. In total the annual savings with this formula change is $164,889.18.

I’m nominating Brandon for the WE CARE award because he proved that Winning at Oil Dri is truly a Team game as he utilized both teammates at the IC in Chris, Monika, and Nick and felines in Birch and Lily to solve a huge problem that has helped increase our supply and reduce our cost.