Supply Chain and a Packaging System Approach

Sean, This is exactly the kind of questions we should be asking. Rita and the others add key insights too. The scorecards are tools that offer some insight to the material and general package. What we often fail to see is a good understanding of the supply chain and what is required to get the product from the point of manufacture to the point of purchase. We (me included) tend to throw acronyms around that a good portion of the manufacturers have little to no knowledge of. LCA/LCI, ISTA, ASTM, FSC, SFI, PEFC...and the list goes on. Each program or process has good intentions and processes. But most of what I've seen over the past several years is a general lack of understanding of the supply chain's requirements. An optimized package doesn't mean it’s in the lightest possible materials. The package needs to be designed as a system. How much does it weigh? How high will it be stacked? How many times will it be handled? Will it be in a container ship? How long at sea? Can the product help support the load? What time of year (seasonal temperature/humidity variations) will it shipped? Floor loaded or pallets? Machine or hand packaged? There are tons of questions that need to be asked before a package can be properly designed. Unfortunately, most of the time one of the areas that gets squeezed in the product's timeline is packaging. So we end up with the same old packaging design. What if there is a better "mousetrap"? Most of the time we don't have the capital, time or energy to push a new design uphill to get it implemented. If we rely solely on one set of metrics or measurements we may miss some good opportunities. There may be times when adding material, although counterintuitive, makes sense and is the right thing to do. Beefing up a package to reduce damage may be more cost effective in the long run. Reduced damage, reduced handling, and more saleable product with better on-shelf availability, improved cube efficiency, more product on fewer trucks. These are all good things. None of these can be determined or evaluated by a single measurement or metric. The key is insight and understanding of what the supply chain requires and continuing to turn over every rock to drive out inefficiency anywhere we find it in the supply chain.

• view