While advances in technologies have streamlined some manufacturing processes, it has also added complexity and intracity to how things are produced. More and more production managers are therefore looking to their experienced contract packager as a way to support them – at little or no cost!
Cost-effective and value-added
Using a full-service contract production service, including fulfillment center operators and contract packaging services offers more than just an opportunity to “outsource” traditionally in-house operations.5 important things that your contract packager could easily and cost-effectively take over from your management team:
- Kitting: Building kits for down-stream manufacturing processes is a laborious and time-consuming operation. And although it may seem like a “useless” and “non-productive” job, the truth is that kitting is often critical to efficient manufacturing. Using an experienced contract packaging company for your kitting operations helps you perform an operation that would usually consume a lot of in-house labour hours. In delegating it to a contract packager, you not only reduce your reliance on over-time, but at no extra cost you get added benefits of fixed-cost and flexible scheduling.
- Packaging: Short production runs are often a drain on in-house resources. Pushing out such runs to an experienced packaging service will not only relieve you of the stress and hassle of planning and scheduling these “awkward” production cycles; but at no extra cost to you, you get added in-house machine capacity available to deal with higher-margin production orders.
- Assembly: When schedules are tight, manufacturers may be tempted to work additional shifts or hire temporary assembly line labour. Instead of doing so, turning to an contract packaging specialist for support might be a better idea. For one, it will cost you nothing in terms of up-staffing to meet a tough deadline. Additionally, with the contract assembly work taken over by a service provider, your in-house plant is saved from being run to over-capacity – something that usually ends up costing manufacturers in the long-run.
- Branding: Specialized packaging plays a great role in branding. Although you may pay for the services of an experienced contract packager to deliver agreed-upon packaging services, a no-added-cost benefit that you receive is the branding differentiation that seasoned packagers provide when products are professionally packaged. Additionally, you will incur no cost at all for managing the entire process, because your packagers project management team will take on that task.
- Redundancy: The advantage of using contractors is that you don’t need to build redundancy into your production line – something that usually costs manufacturers a lot of money to do. An experienced contract packager will often have multiple distribution and fulfillment centers. At no additional cost to you, you automatically create a redundant manufacturing plan by using contract packagers to support you.
At the end of the day, while tapping into the experience and flexibility offered by an efficient contract packaging company saves you a lot of time and money, there are a number of value-added benefits that your management team can leverage at no cost from such relationships.
