Producing paint, particularly high-performance OEM coatings, is a resource intensive process riddled with potential issues. To avoid these problems, companies often rely on toll paint manufacturers for their OEM coatings.
The right toll manufacturing partner can help relieve capacity constraints, provide formulating and production expertise, and even leverage its relationships with vendors for better raw material pricing. This article explores three of the most common issues that working with a toll paint manufacturer can help resolve.
Toll OEM Producers Provide Extra Capacity
Capacity constraints give rise to most toll paint production partnerships. Whether it’s an equipment or personnel issue, increasing capacity at your own paint facility can be a costly process. You might even need to go through the time-consuming process of building out your plant in order to accommodate increased volume or specialized equipment needs. Bringing in new equipment—especially equipment involved in processing EPA-regulated hazardous materials—can be extremely expensive, and obtaining EPA operating permits for this equipment can add months to your project timeline. Partnering with an experienced toll manufacturer can keep you focused on selling more paint without worrying about rearranging production to accommodate the extra volume.
Toll Paint Manufacturers Provide Production Expertise
If your organization does not have experience manufacturing the particular paint chemistry, learning how to do so effectively can come with a steep learning curve. For high-performance coatings especially, blown batches can result in thousands of dollars’ worth of raw material losses. Even worse, while your paint line is learning the ins and outs of producing paint with an unfamiliar resin chemistry, your customers will be waiting for material. Producing paint from a new chemistry, particularly with low-flashing solvents, sometimes requires specialized training, such as bonding & grounding, DOT hazmat, and PPE respiratory training among others. Working with a manufacturer with expertise in a specific coating chemistry will result in a more streamlined, efficient, reliable paint production process.
Toll Manufacturers Have Superior Buying Power
Introducing a new coatings product line? Chances are you will be buying at least a few raw materials for the first time and in limited quantities. This will increase your cost in the product and necessarily decrease the product’s overall profitability. Working with a toll manufacturer who already produces similar paints and coatings will provide access to better raw material prices through volume purchasing and existing relationships with vendors. Sure, there will be a manufacturing charge associated with the paint, but for many high-performance industrial coatings, this charge will be minor compared to the savings toll paint manufacturers can achieve on raw material purchases.
Deciding whether to produce paint in-house or utilize a toll manufacturer is one of the most important decisions in bringing a product to market. Be sure to pick a partner you can count on!
