Webinar highlights growing importance of data and digitalisation in contract packing

Hosted by the editor of Packaging News, Phil Chadwick, the webinar saw Emma Verkaik from the BCMPA, Anita Donohoe at Kinaxia, Mark Rose of Alexir and Josephine Coombe from Nulogy, discuss the value of outsourcing, and how greater collaboration between brand owners and retailers is delivering better results. 

In today’s world, many fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies are realising the benefits of outsourcing part of the supply chain to strategic partners such as contract packers. And, with FMCG brands under pressure to ensure packaging and label-ling printed at a late stage are accurate and contain all the data required for compliance, contract packing as a value-added service has become an essential service. 

Data as a facilitator 

Data was seen as a key enabler by the panel enabling suppliers to tackle market volatility, drive deeper collaboration, enable greater order accuracy, reduce labour constraints and above all maintain visibility across the contract packing supply chain. 

Emma Verkaik from the BCMPA said that digitalisation is about getting ‘everything off paper’ and that members are using digitalisation to drive efficiencies as they grow for the future, sharing the knowledge across the business to drive the visibility within contract packers. 

Realtime visibility & speed of information

Josephine Coombe agreed and highlighted how the ability to capture data in real time is one of the most empowering elements of digitalisation with it facilitating business rather than overturning existing processes. As an example, Nulogy’s Shop Floor Solution which is designed specifically for its contract packing operations, enables end-to-end visibility over the production and quality control workflow, allowing an organisation to drill into data, perform live track-and-trace and remove bottlenecks as they occur. 

Empowerment of people 

Digitalisation and data were also seen as empowering people and Anita highlighted how they make roles more interesting and enable people to move into a more skilled position. Frameworks can also be set, and colleagues empowered to make decisions within these, which is a powerful tool in building trust within an operation.  

Managing a brand’s reputation 

Mark Rose also spoke about how digitalisation provides much greater visibility across the supply chain for a contract manufacturer with stock, visibility of goods available to brands and meets the expectations of transparency across the supply chain. 

The one-hour webinar also looked at digitalisation’s role in innovation and finished on the importance of collaboration in delivering the benefits to a business and the supply chain as a whole. 

For those who missed the webinar it is available to download via the Nulogy website.