Lifting Your Curse of Invisibility

Every business has supply chain yes men. These are people who say all the right buzzwords, like “velocity,” and “lean,” and, the big one, partnership, then go about their business as usual, being paralyzed by exceptions, messing up their plants with work in process inventory, and aggravating customers with their poor performance.

If these pretenders to supply chain excellence would like to see how it’s done, they should look to paperboard converters, both independent and integrated. These are companies with so many constraints facing them that supply chain excellence is becoming a survival strategy – not only for them, but to keep their customers around as well.

Indeed, the supply chain excellence imperative is so powerful it’s swimming upstream, from retailers to their consumer packaged goods suppliers, all the way to corrugated and folding carton converting plants. This newsletter is dedicated to reporting the supply chain best practices being demanded of paperboard converters and to profiling those who are not only responding to this demand, but anticipating it.

You’ll read about people like Rob Warnock, general manager of Jamestown Container’s Buffalo plant, which is offering supply chain fulfillment services as a way to more effectively serve customers.

“Provide customers with operational freedom,” Warnock suggests, “and embrace your customer’s chaos. It’s your friend. It makes customers depend on you.”

Jamestown adopted Toyota’s Total Quality System to help customers better serve their customers. That means measuring quality of their product in production, before it reaches the customer. It also means knowing every aspect of your operation, from startup, throughout the daily operations, to the daily wrapup.

“By following this you can see a 10 percent improvement on the bottom line,” Warnock says. “We cut operating expenses and increased profits the first year of implementation. It forces you to find failure points. We’ve only had two quality events in the last two years.”

Converters are learning that by being supply chain experts and fixing problems, they stand a better chance of getting customers for life.

Georgia-Pacific Corp.’s Containerboard and Packaging Division wins and keeps customers by giving them easy access to information. Its Order & Account Management System is a web-based tool allowing customers to enter orders, check order status, modify or cancel orders, and look at invoicing and shipment information. Customers like Unilever, Kellogg’s and General Mills use the system regularly. GP realizes that supply chain flow is as much about information as product flow.

Even retailers like the Zellers HBC chain in Canada are pulling back the converter’s veil of invisibility and recognizing the box maker’s role in keeping product flowing through their stores.

 “It’s important for packaging providers to understand the deliverables that retailers deal with and what they can do to help us,” says Julian O’Connell, marketing director of health and beauty aids for this retailer. “In most cases there is a vendor between the retailer and the packaging industry, so if the converters could look beyond those vendors who are their direct clients and look further down the chain at the retailer, that would give them a competitive advantage.”

It’s this kind of visibility that will result in supply chain profitability. This newsletter is dedicated to helping converters achieve this vision.