10 November 2016 //
Understanding and sharing the goals and requirements for a package is essential for achieving optimal line function and performance. Watch the video to learn more about how EDL has worked with customers to learn their goals to develop packaging equipment solutions that provide benefits even beyond the original objectives.
TRANSCRIPT
It’s always good for us if a customer will share all their wants and desires for the package throughout its distribution process. It truly is a partnership of building the equipment to do exactly what they want.
Sometimes we get very tight specifications and we don’t know what’s happening before or afterwards so we can only work to what we’ve been told and the specification is directing us into a path that may not be ultimately what they want.
There are times when we have to develop something. We’ve done that over the years — a package is needed to be done a certain way and it hasn’t yet existed.
Take foam plates, for example, where the customer had a box of eight packages in a corrugated shipper. We put the same eight packages into a tight wrap package without the corrugated shipper. It had never been done before. We had to stretch wrap and then put them into a bag.
The package was tremendously successful in the area we didn’t realize, which was the distribution. They could actually get hold of the package in the distribution system a lot easier than they could handle this very strange-shaped corrugated box, which was thin, high, and long. So the distribution system guys loved it.
Tonight I’m flying to see a customer tomorrow. I’ve been to some of their plants, but not this particular plant. They make windows and I’m really interested to see what their process is, how they make the window and bring it to the packaging line and see how we can assist in the ergonomics of that because there have been a lot of other cases of when we’ve actually been to the site where they’re producing a product and we know what their aims and goals are and we can tend to be a lot more effective in producing a piece of equipment or a line if we know what the real wants and desires are in the beginning. It makes our jobs easier and more a lot more rewarding in the end.