Metal Packaging Manufacturer

The company manufactures a range of metal boxes for a wide range of customers. These include gift boxes for chocolates or biscuits at Christmas. The bulk of the sales are seasonal but they traditionally lost out when more boxes are needed and are rarely available. This caused the need for two large warehouses to store metal boxes and excess stocks that often get scrapped. As the box design is a part of the marketing package, each year it changes. The customer for boxes is the food manufacturer, who wants flexibility, including short response times for prototypes.

The Solution - The first step was to find out what the customer actually wants. Traditional relationships tended to create conflict in the commercial transactions because of the pressure at key times. Gaining understanding of the pattern of customer needs, enabled us to advise the client to devise an engineering and operational strategy that could be developed to produce the product faster and with greater flexibility than was previously possible. We identified the approach as Just-in-Time with some stock build before the very busy period in the few months before Christmas.

The Results - The engineering capabilities of the business were very sound but had not been exposed to this thinking before. With minimal input from consulting engineers the client has been able to implement the operational strategy and grow the business.

The two large warehouses are now empty for most of the time, there has been little product damage (previously a major problem) and flexibility is now the normal way of working.