Aptia Engineering | Shale Flora | Botanical Extraction Equipment

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IN-DEPTH INTERVIEWS WITH Top CORPORATE EXECUTIVES (727) 480-7070 info@ceocfocontact.com

Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor

Steve Alexander, Associate Editor

Bud Wayne, Marketing
& Production Manager

Christy Rivers - Editorial Associate

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Aptia Engineering – providing Process Equipment Solutions for the Botanical Extraction, Specialty Chemical, and Pharmaceutical Industry

Shale Flora

Founder

Aptia Engineering

https://aptiaengineering.com/

Contact:

503-308-9495

info@aptiaengineering.com

Interview conducted by:

Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor

CEOCFO Magazine

Published – February 28, 2022

CEOCFO: Mr. Flora, what is Aptia Engineering?

Mr. Flora: Aptia is a manufacturing, engineering, and technical consulting company. Our largest market is the botanical extraction space but we also work in a number of other industries. We engineer and manufacture equipment solutions for people who need light industrial stainless process equipment.

CEOCFO: Would you give us a few examples that show the range of what you do - what someone needs, how you would craft a solution for them and what you might look at that less knowledgeable people do not recognize?

Mr. Flora: We manufacture equipment for a number of industries including hemp, botanical extraction, the food and beverage, specialty chemical, battery manufacturing, nanoparticle, and pharmaceutical space. Basically, anyone who needs light industrial stainless equipment can come to us for equipment engineering and manufacturing. We generally manufacture portable equipment skids that are smaller than a shipping container. That is the general overview of the markets we are serving.

A lot of people come to us with an outline of what they need to accomplish, but they do not know exactly how they are going to mechanize that process to achieve it. For example, a pharmaceutical client may come to us with a process that mixes and consumes both methanol and water. They need a way to separate the methanol and water from their product, and then a way to separate the methanol from the water as well. We would design a process that recycles and purifies the methanol, or methanol and water, so that they can be re-used.

As another example, botanical extraction clients often come to us asking for us to propose equipment to transform raw hemp or other botanical material into finished bulk extracts that go into consumer products. We work with these clients to determine the types and quantities of products that they wish to produce, and then we back out the pieces of equipment that are needed to make those products. In these types of applications, we can fill most needs with pre-engineered equipment. Needs that cannot be met with pre-engineered equipment are then filled by custom engineered solutions.

We meet client needs with a mix of pre-engineered “off-the-shelf” style products, contract engineering, and custom manufacturing.

CEOCFO: Is a lot of the equipment in these industries custom?

Mr. Flora: It depends on the industry. Many small and moderate scale equipment needs in the botanical extraction industry can be met with pre-engineered equipment. Large projects in the botanical extraction industry often require custom work.

We are mainly doing custom work for larger equipment requirements in the hemp and cannabis space and for all of the other industries. The other industries use more varied equipment to perform specialized and sometimes proprietary processes.

It is always more economical to fill an equipment need with a piece of pre-engineered equipment than with custom equipment, but clients have different needs, and we can support both types of projects.

CEOCFO: Where does technology come into play?

Mr. Flora: A lot of the technology used in the process equipment world has been around for a long time. The technology is proven and effective for the most part. That said, there is a huge range of how well and effectively technology is implemented. For example, the basic technology of a falling film evaporator, FFE, has been around for decades, but a well-designed FFE can provide 10 times the performance of a poorly designed FFE in the same size piece of equipment. There are always more efficient and smarter ways to implement and combine technologies. Smart design is a key way that we differentiate ourselves in our field.

CEOCFO: From the recent Aptia press release regarding your intelligent design, “It shines with your hydrocarbon extraction platform.” What are you doing differently from others?

Mr. Flora: The use of pre-engineered equipment is especially high in the hemp and cannabis industries. A lot of manufacturers have tried to come up with simple pieces of equipment that they can manufacture overseas economically, import, and then sell in the United States. The goals of these equipment providers are ease-of-production, repeatability, and low cost. For the most part, these companies have not been focused on how to improve or increase the efficiency of the actual extraction process. We went about the design process differently, and we designed a piece of equipment around operational efficiency and the actual thermodynamic needs of the system. One of the key differences that came from the design process is that our equipment can process several times more material than a competitive system of the same size. We still use some of the similar vessels and tanks, but the actual flow and operation of our system is fairly different.

One example is hydrocarbon recovery. The standard thing to do is to heat the recovery vessel and to cool the solvent storage vessel. The heat exchange area of the vessel is all that is used in the process. This is really slow because of the limited heat transfer area and poor heat transfer efficiency. To make matters worse, other businesses provide recovery compressors that are not properly sized. Then they expect the operator to manually turn the compressor on and off as needed to match the speed of the process. This all boils down to underperforming recovery and batch inconsistency.

We redesigned the vessels and implemented specific heat exchangers to provide much greater heat transfer area on both the evaporator and condenser sides, which gives way faster recovery capability. Then we size a hydrocarbon compressor for each specific application so that the compressor capacity matches the client’s throughput requirements. We also run the compressor on a more advanced piece of software that automatically controls the compressor’s speed so that it matches the hydrocarbon load. This means that the process is always conducted under the same evaporation conditions, which greatly reduces batch variability. All in all, this recovery process is way faster, requires less operator labor, and creates more consistent products.

CEOCFO: Are businesses starting to look for a better and more efficient way?

Mr. Flora: It still depends on the business. In small and new state-by-state legal cannabis markets, you can sometimes get away with simple, small pieces of equipment. As the market matures, product prices become more competitive and consumption increases. This is when people have to start turning to better engineered solutions.

We are steadily seeing an uptick in the amount of business that comes to us as the botanical extraction market matures. We work primarily with experienced operators who are interested in increasing their production capacity or efficiency. Often people get started with a small piece of equipment from an importer, and then have to rebuy later to grow.

CEOCFO: What is your geographic reach today?

Mr. Flora: We have equipment in most states in the USA, as well as in Jamaica and South Africa. We are working on a couple of active jobs in South America as well.

CEOCFO: Are you looking to grow globally?

Mr. Flora: Right now, we are interested in expanding into the Canadian marketplace and into the European marketplace. This type of international growth is something that we are going to start to pursue throughout 2022 and 2023.

CEOCFO: How do you work with your customers in providing support and how turnkey are these systems typically?

Mr. Flora: The amount of training depends on the type of equipment they want. For example, if a client comes to us for a simple reactor system, then they often do not even need onsite training. For simple equipment like this, we typically go through the manual with the client and answer questions, and then we typically provide phone support as they set it up and commission it. However, when we get into more complex equipment like solvent recovery units, we typically send out a field technician to commission the equipment and to teach the operators how to safely operate it. On the last day that our field technician is out in the field, the client is actually operating the equipment under the supervision of our field technician. Our clients get a pretty good training upfront.

For maintenance, our equipment is long-lasting. We carry an inventory of spare parts and we are always available for phone support, but maintenance is not a huge portion of our business because the equipment is very reliable to start with. For example, we have been shipping solvent recovery units for years, and we haven’t had any service requests at all for the most common type of system that we sell.

CEOCFO: Do you have subcontractors throughout the country?

Mr. Flora: It depends on where the equipment will be installed. In the US, one of our field technicians will provide onsite support. If the equipment is outside the country, we will either send a local technician or we will look for a local service contractor who can support our client. It depends on what make the most financial sense for us and for the client.

CEOCFO: How has COVID affected the business?

Mr. Flora: The main impact of COVID on our business was the supply-chain. Let’s say it took 100 man-hours to make a piece of equipment last year. It now, however, may take 150 man-hours to make that same piece of equipment due to the difficulties with the supply-chain. There are a ton of suppliers that have ships offshore with small parts and trinkets that they need to make pieces of equipment, and that has a ripple effect all the way up through the manufacturing world. Our team is good at navigating and circumventing supply-chain issues, and we have been effective at meeting our client delivery windows. It just requires more time and effort on our team’s part.

CEOCFO: How about finding staff, lots of companies are having trouble now?

Mr. Flora: Our work is specialized, so there is a fairly long training period to bring new people up to speed and to build the knowledge that we need in all of our staff. Hiring is not a major problem for us because we have low turnover and we have good staff. We are not suffering from the common staffing issues. We have almost 100% retention and a relatively small team so it is easy to manage.

CEOCFO: Are you able to handle all that comes your way? Can ramp-up when needed?

Mr. Flora: We do not take on more work than we can handle. We do, at times, have to tell custom equipment prospects that we cannot take-on their project immediately, and we provide a timeline for when we anticipate being able to start on their job. This does not happen for the pre-engineered equipment, but it does sometimes happen for the larger custom jobs. Custom engineering and custom manufacturing are resource intensive. All said, most of the time we have less than a 2-week waitlist for custom engineering projects. Our longest wait-time for custom work to date has been about 6 weeks.

CEOCFO: Aptia has a reach into many industries? How do you reach out and are there certain industry where you have more traction than others? Would you like to see the mix change?

Mr. Flora: The mix we have right now is pretty excellent and diverse, and it is also well insulated in terms of market instabilities and market change. We are very happy with our current mix of business. We just want to keep growing that portfolio and extending into more diverse and more technical applications.

CEOCFO: How are you reaching out to prospective customers?

Mr. Flora: We receive a lot of work through word-of-mouth. We also do active outreach campaigns. We will reach out through mailers, Instagram, email, through professional contacts in the industry, and we do have an active marketing arm that is focused on contacting new clients.

CEOCFO: Why choose Aptia Engineering?

Mr. Flora: A couple of reasons. The first is quality. The quality of equipment and the quality of service that you get from Aptia is much higher than what you get with our competitors. Quality is a cornerstone of our business. We strive to provide excellent equipment solutions that are well thought out, do what we say they are going to do, outperform expectations, and outlast competing equipment options.

The second reason is thoughtful design. As we previously discussed, there is a huge range of how well and how effectively technology is implemented. We excel at engineering more efficient and smarter ways to implement technologies. This means superior performance and increased reliability for our clients.

Aptia Engineering | Shale Flora | Botanical Extraction Equipment | Hemp Extraction Equipment | Aptia Engineering – providing Process Equipment Solutions for the Botanical Extraction, Specialty Chemical, and Pharmaceutical Industry | CEO Interviews 2022 | Industrial Companies | Cannabis Company | Medical Companies | Global Company | Process Equipment, Wiped Film Distillation, Solvent Recovery Equipment, Winterization Equipment, Crystallization Equipment, Aptia Engineering Press Releases, News, Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram

“A lot of people come to us with an outline of what they need to accomplish, but they do not know exactly how they are going to mechanize that process to achieve it.”
Shale Flora

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“A lot of the technology used in the process equipment world has been around for a long time. The technology is proven and effective for the most part. That said, there is a huge range of how well and effectively technology is implemented. For example, the basic technology of a falling film evaporator, FFE, has been around for decades, but a well-designed FFE can provide 10 times the performance of a poorly designed FFE in the same size piece of equipment.” Shale Flora