Business & Money | Sunday 10 March, 2019 3:32 am |

Impact, the BP Chemicals spin off founded in 2002, has relaunched as Impact Solutions – delivering value in petrochemicals and plastics. The move comes as the company prepares a greatly increased portfolio of expertise and services to be displayed for the first time at the Saudi PPPP (Print, Pack, Plas & Petrochemical) exhibition in Riyadh, 18-21 October 2009. 

Chief Executive Rob Meek (pictured)  says that ‘our rechristening and relaunch this year reflects the importance and value of both plastics and petrochemicals for our core business. In truth, however, the uptake for our kind of expertise is seeing a rising demand in many other process industry sectors throughout the world.’ 

Meek reports that ‘over the past three years, our business matrix has evolved way beyond our origins as a laboratory and test house. At one level we needed to rebrand and reflect accordingly. Our scientific expertise and facilities have grown and developed in that time, but we are increasingly making our mark for on-site and client-based services in process plant design – upstream and downstream; process plant optimisation; new product development; product quality standards – setting and monitoring.’ 

Meek says that the Impact Solutions client-centred work is now largely based with emerging players and emerging countries in the world plastics and petrochemicals markets. ‘We are succeeding in fast-tracking many client business to the necessary world-class levels of competitiveness. That’s the essence of what we do – and why our company has grown.’ 

Impact Solutions blue-chip experience saves its clients money in two main ways - upstream in optimising manufacturing costs and also downstream – in helping ensure that new products are manufactured to a quality level that will allow them to compete on the global stage. 

The Impact Solutions four-fold business matrix takes a modern view of industry needs. It has four sectors that support each other. 

Cost-down and quality-raising manufacturing consultancy for process plants 
New product standards – setting, organisation and management 
Training and people development in manufacturing and quality roles 
Product and process testing work together with new product innovation 

Where appropriate, Impact will undertake to work with Governments, national and local, in order to make sure that all of the above success factors come together in a coherent whole to meet international competitiveness levels. 

The Impact Solutions business matrix include: 

- Process plant optimisation; including performance improvement; cost-down; quality improvement; off-spec reduction 

- People training and development in all areas of process manufacturing; management and technical 

- Design and implementation of world-class technical and R&D centres for new polymer producers 

- Design and implementation of world-class quality control and quality assurance systems – at Government and company level 

- Accredited development and testing of high risk products and materials to support quality and quality assurance 

- Product innovation and testing for the new horizons in recycled plastics materials and recycled plastics products 

- Speciality product innovation and testing in plastic pipelines, packaging and waste plastic applications 

Rob Meek says that ‘it is particularly pleasing to be launching our new-look company at Saudi PPPP this month. Our reception in the Middle East region over the past two years has exceeded all of our expectations and the Saudi PPPP show gives us an excellent opportunity to offer a wide range of solutions, including process management and optimisation, product development, training and quality and standards systems.’ 

Impact Solutions is set for a long-term presence on the ground in the Middle East with an office and resource facility planned to open in Saudi Arabia next year and with medium term plans for facilities in Bahrain in order to serve markets including North Africa and India. 

In time, says Meek, Impact plans a full network of Middle Eastern ‘centres of excellence’ that will ‘provide the region with the means for quality standards, manufacturing and learning; principally for plastics production and manufacturing. With this in place - for both upstream and downstream plastics manufacturing – Impact will be establishing the excellence in the overall manufacturing and trading environment.’