I spend my day about
involved in many a rout.
Collecting revisions from another one
just when I thought the project done.
But wait, changes are a more…
Too late, it’s out the door!

While clearly in jest, this is pretty close to “life in the day of” for a packaging manager at your typical CPG or life sciences company. Each day, they’re tasked with trafficking hundreds, maybe even thousands, of packaging or collateral projects throughout an organization.

And this is no easy task. Just think, a typical product launch involves hundreds of interactions – between field sales and focus groups, promotional agencies and production companies, legal teams and licensing departments. Now compound that with said number of projects and the number is truly staggering.

With so many touch-points human error is inevitable. Unfortunately for the poor traffic manager, such errs fall on her shoulders. What’s more, they’re costly mistakes. For each day a product is late to the market, dollars can be lost. Take, for example, a product like the popularly marketed drug Celebrex. With sales reaching $3.3 billion, that’s $9 million a day that could be left on the table! Or looked at another way, since the bulk of brands that make it to market first end up owning the majority of market share – regardless of whether or not theirs is the superior product – even a few days’ time can end up putting a product at a serious disadvantage.

“So?” you say, “We know The Packaging Manager’s process isn’t perfect…we expect rework and project delays, and besides, there’s no better way.” But there is. Companies need to scrap the tools of yesteryear’s traffic manager. No more can photocopied sign-off sheets suffice. Call an end to the myriad of untranslatable annotations scrawled on design document. Call off all office stop-bys as a means of relieving project gridlock. Do away with Excel as a project tracker for your work load, it has much better uses.
The whole process begs for systemization by its very nature. It’s complex but repetitive and as such, technology needs to be the enabler. By automating the packaging process and making the shift from manual to digital processes, you can enhance online process initiation, online review of designs, online approval, easy collaboration between design, brand, legal, regulatory, manufacturing etc. In short, facilitate and expedite the Packaging Manager’s job.

Darlene Hollywood
President, D. Hollywood PR

Compliance with Food and Drug Administration regulations is rarely a popular topic so starting this blog entry with that reference may cause half of you to stop reading. If you are willing to continue, this entry should offer you a few clues on the hidden value in “FDA Compliance”. Recent FDA requirements, such as those associated with trans-fat labeling, leave no doubt that we are living in a strong regulatory environment.

Let’s look at some of the hallmarks of this mandated environment. Compliance and the associated audits are costly and they are not an option. Compliance is not a one-time project; it is an ongoing process that demands systemization. FDA compliance frequently equates to answering some basic questions; do you have a packaging and labeling process that meets FDA regulations? Can you prove it? Can the process be audited? Have you retained the data necessary to pass an audit? Does your packaging and labeling solution have the ability to pass an FDA audit?

Simply having a process does not in and of itself pass FDA audit. However, automating a compliant process and using applications to deliver the track and trace capabilities required by compliance, do put you on the road to passing regulatory audits. Without use of technology to automate and track your process, keeping up with regulatory initiatives is akin to trying to get ahead on a treadmill while the speed is progressively increased.

The track and trace capabilities required by the FDA allow managers to see all elements of the packaging process both “in-house” and those that are outsourced. Forward thinking managers understand that process visibility is the first step towards accountability and best in class processes.

You cannot improve that which you cannot see. Today’s packaging automation platforms give to management the ability to: meet FDA requirements, mandate and monitor quality, while developing consistency across the entire packaging and labeling process. The net result should be enhanced brand equity. Consistency and quality help brand managers to avoid the negative impact of recent high-profile food packaging mislabeling recalls that have cost manufacturers brand equity and share price. Not to mention one’s salary continuation plan.

Link up here for some additional thoughts on best in class practices for Life Sciences

Susan Roberts
Director of Marketing
Paxonix, a MeadWestvaco company

When brilliantly executed, packaging drives strategic differentiation in competitive markets, producing incremental sales and greater brand preference. However consistency in the execution of packaging demands structured, repeatable, and low-defect process controls.

Here’s one example of why these kinds of rigorous processes are so necessary: the Vice President of Marketing at a major beverage producer was recently asked to redesign and deliver to thousands of national supermarket shelves, 25 different private label SKUs … in at total of two weeks. Simultaneous to this, he was asked by another brand owner to do the same for 100 of their SKUs …. also in two weeks. In fact both requests were to be accomplished in the same two week period and on top of the normally hectic workload.

As you are aware, these are not unusual requests in the world of private label. Examples abound at publications like Private Label Magazine and our favorite, Consumer Goods Technology.

We’d love to hear about your private label challenges and how you are accomplishing these kinds of gargantuan tasks. Here are our thoughts on how to hit the ball out of the park on private label:

A packaging workflow process, well implemented, enabled by technology and well understood within your organization, is the most effective means of addressing these day-to-day challenges so you can meet critical, contractually-required turnarounds.

Agreed?

Susan Roberts
Director of Marketing
Paxonix, a MeadWestvaco company

1. How is my data protected from loss?
A SaaS provider should provide multiple backups. Both locally and offsite. There should be a auditable chain of custody for your backed up data.

2. How is my data protected from unauthorized access?
Only a minimal set of authorized personnel should have administrative access to your data.

3. How often do you test restore data? How do you verify its integrity?
Sample data should be test restored quarterly at a minimum (depending on the backup mechanism used). It should be restored to a point where it can be verified through the application that uses it.

4. Are there any single points of failure?
The answer should be no. If there are single points of failure you should ask how long the system will be down if that item fails.

5. How do you deal with the loss of single server? A data center?
There should be a documented plan for recovering from the failure of any component required to deliver your services from a server to an entire data center. Again, you should ask how long the system will be unavailable in the case of any of those failures.

6. Can you provide example procedures for the deployment, upgrade, and maintenance of your system?
A provider should be able to provide you with samples of high level procedures and detailed installation instructions they use.

7. Can you provide a record that proves you have conducted these procedures in the past?
They should be able to provide a record of when any change has occurred to their systems including who performed the change.

8. What Service Level Agreement options are available? What do they cover?
The provider should offer at least one tier of a Service Level Agreement that at a minimum covers system availability.

9. What regulatory standards are you in compliance with? 21 CRF Part 11, Sarbanes Oxley, HIPPA, etc
You should look for providers that are already living under relevant regulations or regulations that have the same intent.

10. Can I talk to one of your existing customers in my industry?
The best way to find out about a provider is via a existing customer. Make sure to ask how they handle problems. If they say there are no problems then get another reference. Every relationship has rough patches and how those are handled is a key indicator for the quality of the provider.

John Horton
Director of Technology Operations
Paxonix, a MeadWestvaco company

The statement “We are now in a commodity business” can make a multi-million dollar per year CEO blanch and go weak in the knees. It can also trigger an immediate round of marketing expense cuts, personnel reductions and general weeping and gnashing of teeth. Unfortunately, it also may be completely self-inflicted.

We seem to have evolved (some would say devolved) to a belief that all products eventually become commodities with significantly lower profit margins. Columbia Business School professor Bruce Greenwald has said this about innovative technologies: “In the long run, everything is a toaster.” Implying that eventually innovation has no effect on a product with many versions of the same product competing solely on price. In a recent MIT Sloan Management Review entitled "The Myth of Commoditization,” Michael Schrage, an MIT technology researcher does a nice job of arguing that commoditization does not have to be the future for any product, including toasters. He details the innovations in toasters from their emergence in 1905 to the present and lists the many innovations that continue to allow some toaster models to compete on everything except price. I saw a two-slicer the other day selling for $235. No commodity, that.

The “self-fulfilling prophecy” occurs when a company decides that their product has, indeed, become a commodity, usually based on the emergence of a lower cost alternative. Not realizing that the condition may be temporary, the company begins to treat their own product as a commodity, which usually means a reduction in the investment for that particular product. This creates a cap on what is an “acceptable” level of innovation and, almost by definition, forces new and innovative ideas to be discarded (as too expensive under the cap) or missed entirely.

This lack of innovation does a disservice to the company, its investors, its employees and most of all, its customers.

Oddly enough, better prices AND innovation can both come from an improvement in, of all things, process.

Innovation does not come from crisis. Shortcuts, yes. Innovation, rarely. Innovation has to be part of the overall process of providing the product to customers. It relies on having enough time in the process for innovative ideas to appear, be refined, tested and implemented. With the pressures we all have in the areas of speed to market, quality improvement and a reduction in rework, it is clear that our current processes do not contain this extra time. We must find ways to improve the process to gain the time to be able to innovate.

More on where to find process improvements that foster innovation in an upcoming entry.

Kent St. Vrain
Vice President, Marketing and Business Development
Paxonix, a MeadWestvaco company

Our goal is to have a meaningful conversation with interested parties about the changing role of marketing (and especially packaging) in consumer goods and life sciences companies. We’d like to focus on how technology can enable innovation, better process, faster time to market and greater accountability in these companies.

Let’s start with how to contribute.
Comments will be posted when they offer value to the readership – i.e., by adding new information, opinions and ideas. Negative or contrary opinions are welcome as long as they don’t violate the common rules of netiquette. Those that do will be deleted.
Comments will be deleted if they meet the following definitions of flaming, trolling, or personal attacks:
flaming - messages which are hostile or deliberately insulting
trolling - making comments intended to induce an angry response or disrupt the flow of discussion
personal attacks - derogatory, profane or offensive messages directed toward a specific individual.

Who we are and what we will be blogging about:

Paxonix, a division of MeadWestvaco, a $6 billion leader in the packaging industry, drives business success by accelerating branding and packaging processes across the entire enterprise, improving quality and reducing rework.

Our solution, PaxPro, positively impacts the following aspects of your business and so those are the topics we will focus on in this blog:

Reduction in time to market
Improvement in quality outcomes in packaging, POP and collateral materials
Greater time for innovation
Visibility into status of product launches and other packaging or marketing projects
Greater accountability
Improved regulatory compliance processes (21 CFR Part 11, Sarbanes Oxley, Six Sigma)

Susan Roberts
Director, Marketing
Paxonix, a MeadWestvaco company

Blog on. Or contact me at blog@paxonix.com