Getting the most from your packaging means more than simply reducing costs and ensuring consistent performance. Truly maximising your packaging spend can be achieved by making sure both your materials and suppliers are delivering on their promises.
Whether you’re an established retail outfit or a fledgling manufacturing business, you need packaging that helps support your drive for better service and consistent quality.
So to make sure your operation is on track when it comes to product protection and system efficiency, here are some key considerations to bear in mind.
Stock management systems: making packaging work for you
While it may seem prudent to keep all your packaging supplies on site, it can often become burdensome when increased inventory and warehouse restructuring are necessary. Rather than being a safeguarding measure, an excess of large, bulky packaging can result in lost warehouse space, creating a need for additional storage for your products. This increases costs and ultimately renders your packaging a financial liability, since floor and racking space could be needlessly occupied, slowing picking routes and limiting the available room to store products.
To offset this, consider switching to a supplier that offers a flexible stock management system. By doing so, the headaches associated with monitoring and tracking volumes can be passed on, letting you increase your storage capacities, maintain production levels and operate with heightened agility.
Just-in-time delivery
As the name suggests, a just-in-time delivery model lets businesses order the materials they need and boost their onsite packaging volumes at the point of increased busyness. Suppliers work to get their packaging to their customers at precisely the right time, meaning warehouse space isn’t lost to large deliveries arriving too early. Better still, by ordering on a more flexible, ad-hoc basis, overspends can be avoided.
Pivotally, stock management systems allow businesses to make use of their suppliers’ storage and operational expertise and increased capacities, ensuring their packaging is correctly housed and delivered in the most efficient manner possible. At times of increased demand, this can offer huge value, since packaging suppliers can provide detailed insights for better packing processes and the optimal fulfillment procedures for their products.
How data informs packaging purchases
By partnering with established packaging suppliers, businesses can rely on increased accuracy of reporting and a more detailed account of their material use. This emphasis on data-driven reporting has become particularly valuable in recent years, with the rollout of the Plastic Packaging Tax causing businesses to produce quarterly reports detailing their use of non-recycled materials.
Understand your requirements to stay ahead
Partnering with packaging operators offering stock management systems means your material requirements can be forecasted well ahead of time, letting your operations managers and buying teams focus on their core duties. Better still, your business can leverage your suppliers’ expertise and mitigate against overuse, gain access to insights and update your material needs when new packaging innovations become available.