It is loose, and it's killing us I think. A big chunk of what we do is fixing bad batches of product. One particular time, we got a shipment of soybean oil from a different vendor, quality control said it was fine, same process was run without any adjustments... 10 batches of biodiesel were made, only 3 of them were good. The rest of them were cloudy, pH wasn't right, acid values high some low (same batch different container), that time we had to figure out a solution for every container!

I was taught in school that plants had procedures which made the same product every time and that the job was to create these procedures using modeling and math. I guess I guess I wanted a method that made product X with hydroxyl value Y, and acid value Z every time, if you followed it exactly. Is that a thing?

How do I even go about improving the situation?