Andrew Bass
August 26, 2024
Poka Labs started with a simple realization: the software used in chemical manufacturing just wasn’t built with the industry in mind.
Back in 2022, I was headed to business school after working at Lord Corp. Lord was a great place—really advanced in using ERP systems and data for operations. But like most chemical companies, we often ended up relying on spreadsheets. The issue? Beyond the usual spreadsheet limitations, they don’t account for the science behind chemical processes. I remember one project where I spent most of my time just trying to tweak data to align with my chemical knowledge. It was incredibly frustrating, and it kept happening no matter how hard I looked for better solutions. This problem wasn’t limited to just one area—it showed up in production analytics, scheduling, quality control, and just about every part of chemical operations.
During my time at Lord, I learned a lot about operations theory—things like Lean Six Sigma and the Toyota Production System. While these theories have some useful ideas, they’re mostly built for making widgets, not chemicals. The software reflects that, too. It’s designed for discrete manufacturing and then forced to fit the chemical industry, an industry with significantly more variability. I knew there had to be a better way, and I wanted to find it.
At business school, I met Andrew. He had a completely different background—he was a software engineer who’d worked at Meta and a startup focused on mobility optimization. Andrew didn’t know much about chemicals, but he was passionate about bringing better software to traditional industries. We teamed up, and Poka Labs was born.
As we started talking to other chemical manufacturers, we realized my experience at Lord wasn’t unique. Almost everyone had their own version of “Excel hell,” and it was clear that running a plant with spreadsheets was just asking for mistakes. We decided to fix that.
Our name, Poka Labs, comes from Poka-Yoke, a Japanese term for mistake-proofing. We believe that by building an operating system specifically for the chemical industry, we can truly deliver on that idea and drive innovation in chemical operations.
A photo from our trip to New Zealand.
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If your plant is looking to "mistake-proof" your operations, we'd love to help! Please reach out to us at founders@pokalabs.com or schedule a demo.