4 Tips to Scale Up – Going Beyond Lab Trials

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Producing a new product using a sheet material (paper, textile, film, nonwoven or composite) involves overcoming a lot of obstacles and rocky patches, especially when moving from a small concept sample to a commercial product. How to scale up and achieve success despite the roadblocks? Realize that changes will likely be needed in the product and process – and the sooner these are found, the better.

1. Be Sure You Have a Sense of Urgency

Time is of the essence: you and those around you must be filled with a sense of excitement, timeliness and the importance of your challenge. If you fail, you just might run out of time. Move quickly.

2. Have a Clear Plan to Scale Up  

In the quest to make a good lab scale sample – do not cheat! Producing a beautiful, small sample at slow speed is not the goal. It only gets harder as you scale up. At Micrex, we have seen too many customers take a short cut and get excited about a small sample, assuming it will successfully scale up.

Lab scale is where you look for truths:

  • It is more difficult to run wide than narrow. As an analogy — a long bridge is harder to build than a short one.
  • Run speed – slow is easy, fast is hard.
  • Many processes fail over time, as dust or other contaminates build up, or process components wear.

At lab scale, the severity of these issues become apparent. How do the results change if you double the width, length or speed? This might indicate a limitation or provide an opportunity to prevent a problem.

3. Don’t Assume the Raw Material Will Be Consistent

As in cooking and wine making – the ingredients are important! We often have customers who claim that one batch of roll goods is “exactly the same” as another. This will be documented with a data sheet or C of A. The reality is that no two rolls of material are the same.

The real question is: “How does the process handle normal variation of the raw material?”

4. Keep in Touch with Marketing and the Customer

Most of roll goods product development is tied to specifications. In the broader world of product design, there is often no specification. As a result, the entity running a trial may make assumptions that will not align with the end customer. Be sure to ask yourself: are you using the right specification?

Our Product Is Our Technology

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We are often asked — “What are you selling?” This is a reasonable question for companies looking for commodity products.

There are no “Micrex wipes” or “Micrex bandages” – At Micrex, our product is our technology.

IDEA 2016

We collaborate with some of the most creative Research & Development organizations in the world. Micrex may be viewed externally as a contract converter or equipment manufacturer by some, but at our core, we are focused on new products.

To see what we can do now and in the future, we suggest that you focus on how The Micrex Process alters product properties, such as bulk, stretch and extensibility, pre-shrinking, absorbency, decorative effects and softness on a wide range of substrates.

The real question is: how can these attributes be used to enhance your existing products or enable a whole new product category. Every product developed with Micrex technology was once a new product.