Freelance Consultant's Diary

In recent weeks I have received emails and phone calls from packaging industry executives who are concerned about the future. While the industry has been branded as “laggard,” “slow to change” and other not-so-flattering descriptions by analysts in recent months, several industry executives have started to embrace new business models. However, as these executives start to implement these new business models, they are already seeing these models failing at some of the early adopter companies. The recent demise of several business models that only a year or so ago were hailed as revolutionary is enough reason to cause serious doubts. To many senior-level executives in the packaging industry, this only means even more confusion regarding future steps. I will try to address some of these concerns in a two-part article. In this article, I will try to put the recent events of the so-called “new economy” in perspective, and then next week I will analyze what it means to the packa...

Recently I have been talking to a lot of packaging companies that either have no independent web presence at all or are in the process of improving it to better connect with their customers. To my surprise, I have also been speaking to several e-business solutions providers, who are now starting to think about the packaging industry in less generic terms. Some of the questions that they all ask me are: • How much information should be communicated through the Internet? • How can we duplicate the personal relationships over the Internet now that we have customers that are no longer within our standard geographic territory? • What is the most effective strategy to manage the conflict in communicating with customers through personal interaction and the Internet? Amount of information to be shared As part of an unscientific survey that I conducted with a few executives, I presented the following two scenarios to them: Scenario 1 : Company A has a website that provides compreh...

The majority of packaging converters do not appear to be prepared to make the transition to e-commerce. This jump will require a reengineering of business processes. I tend to look at the packaging industry as a combination of three value blocks. We start with the raw material manufacturers, then we have the packaging companies or converters (who convert raw materials into cans, bottles, bags, etc.), and finally there are the end-users. There are others in the value chain such as distributors, designers, equipment manufacturers and packagers, but their role is not strategic to the value chain and can be safely grouped elsewhere for the purpose of this discussion. In looking at some of the recent developments, I have concluded that the strategic control of the value chain has shifted to the converters. They seem to be capturing the highest value in the chain. The raw material manufacturers typically serve more than one industry, and packaging happens to be one of them. Ac...

Let me talk about a typical end-user of packaging materials — a food company, we’ll call it Company X, that uses bottles, cans and films for packaging its range of products. Company X purchases packaging materials from several manufacturers and distributors. It employs an army of purchasing agents to accomplish this mammoth task, and this is not always seamless. Some of the jobs that the purchasing folks perform are requisitioning, research, qualification, receiving quotes, writing purchase orders, tracking supplier performance, certifying, negotiating and even fire-fighting (when goods do not show up as promised). Good news, bad news Well, here is some good news and some bad news. The good news is that a lot of these painful tasks can now be automated, transferred to other agencies, outsourced to the suppliers or eliminated altogether. The bad news is that our friends in the purchasing department would need to learn new skills. The Internet has empowered the department of...

While talking to industry executives during recent weeks, I have been shocked by the radical change in attitude insofar as the digitization of their business is concerned. Only a couple of months ago, I would hear complaints about how they were experiencing threats to their core business from online competitors and executives wanted to formulate strategies to protect their business. Now what I hear is “I told you so” attitude. While some of the remarks that industry executives make these days are arrogant, there are others who have just settled down in their comfort zone by rationalizing their fears – The Internet is only a fad, it is already starting to show signs of failure, and the threats to my business are over. Nothing could be farther from the truth. As Michael Dell puts it, if bad business models are implemented online, they do not become good businesses; they just become bad online businesses. Like all other bad businesses, these too will go out of business, event...