The Productiv Way

The path to your future success starts here.

When you sign on to a project with Productiv, you’re signing more than a purchase order. You’re joining a network of experts and partners who are committed to a certain kind of excellence—the principles we call The Productiv Way.

It’s rare that our clients come to us without wanting some combination of: adding production capacity, increasing throughput, shortening lead times, reducing costs or delighting consumers. For us, the key to accomplishing these critical business objectives is deceptively simple – and uniquely ours. It’s contained within the three pillars of The Productiv Way:

The pillars of the Productiv Way form our company culture and describe what specialized labor-intensive production is all about. We’re also guided by a handful of signature operational approaches, which include staffing a management team with a diverse breadth of experience, staying up to date with technologies that enable innovation, and designing custom processes that are tailored to each project’s objectives.

See how these operational approaches come to life by exploring the pages below.

Our Technology

Reliable secure cloud-based systems that flex and scale to fit your business

Few solutions are more important to business continuity and a successful fulfillment operation than reliable, intuitive technology. With a streamlined, integrated slate of Order Management and Warehouse Management systems, Productiv helps clients move goods more efficiently from the shopping cart to the customer.

We pride ourselves on offering right-size services that fit easily with your current systems. That’s why our systems integrate seamlessly with leading industry suppliers:

Here at Productiv, we’ve designed a technology suite that is flexible and can handle the order management, EDI, shipping integration, and reporting demands of a growing ecommerce business. Here’s how it works:

How it could look for you:

Additional Productiv technology value-adds:

• Robust security through SilverSky Managed Security Services
• Real-time web based data reports on orders, user activity, etc.
• High availability and disaster recovery for 24/7 system uptime
• Geographically dispersed data centers to mitigate risk

Contact us today to learn more about how to put Productiv technologies to work for you.

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Engineering & Process Design

The right setup on the floor can make all the difference

Excluding freight, labor is the single largest expense in fulfillment centers that are not highly automated. Naturally, finding ways to work smarter and engineer a lean process for your kitting, packaging, or assembly task will have a meaningful impact on your bottom line.

As a sophisticated national supply chain partner, Productiv specializes in setting up labor programs for growth and long-term success.

It all begins with implementing a set of lean engineering enhancements that convert fulfillment lines from a ‘Just in Case’ mindset (stockpiling items regardless of orders) to a ‘Just in Time’ mindset (that efficiently schedules workers and other resources based on existing orders).

All Productiv leaders are highly skilled with lean principles and tools to optimize workflows, improve throughput and quality, wring our waste and improve profitability. Some examples include:

• Single piece flow — Workers focus on processing and building one unit at a time. Conveyors are optimized for optimal flow and collaboration between workers. Our staff spends less time doing quality control and rework and more time producing output.
• Pulling work through – Using Kanban or ‘pull’ techniques for receiving, material handling, staging and production.
• Minimizing waste – Scrutinizing all types of process waste to add value and quality
• Jigs – Templates and tools designed to standardize output and sustain quality
• Kaizen – An ongoing commitment to continuous improvement within a project and across multiple programs and sites

A sample diagram of an Engineering & Process Designed client workflow is below:

How it could look for you:

The Table below shows a typical kitting process for Productiv clients. The lean engineering phase is highlighted:

Our Engineering & Design Approach	How You Benefit
Onboard new project: specification review and systems setup	Reduces lead time and improves quality by determining project specs before work goes live
Design workflow processes with lean principles and scalability in mind	Plan to maximize throughput and scale based on requirements
Train reliable Productiv teams on client SOPs	Ensures consistency and quality
Operate on a cost per unit model	Keeps pricing predictable and affordable
Carry out routine quality checks and inspections	Reduce returns and other rework while boosting customer satisfaction
Commit to real-time continuous improvement	Measure KPIs, confer with workers and engineers, tweak and improve

Contact us today to learn more about our design principles could enhance your fulfillment operations.

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Working With Productiv

Differentiated services, outstanding customer experience

Choosing a kitting and fulfillment partner is an important choice for any supply chain manager. We know our clients are looking for turnkey partnerships with experts who can advise during planning and sourcing phases all the way through to reverse logistics and evaluation.

Productiv has deep experience in all of these areas, and we proudly add value in sprint capacity, designated account management, and full program design. Find out more below!

Quote process:

We are nimble and we can be up and running on a project within a matter of days. Contact us for a quote for your kitting, packaging, fulfillment, contract labor or other project. Our quotes are transparent and cover all the bases so you know exactly what you’re getting — no surprise charges. Our pricing allows you to forecast your spend precisely — we only charge for the work we do and the value you receive.

You can expect quick activation (within 24-48 hours) on the process below:

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Custom Program Design

Productiv leverages a wide array of global supply chain partners to seamlessly collaborate and provide end-to-end solutions. If your project requires tasks beyond kitting, packaging or fulfillment such as item sourcing, marketing support, analytics, and more, our custom program design might be right for you. Here’s how it works:

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Productiv Edge Program

Mentorship, incubation, and decades of supply chain know-how for your startup

To date, Productiv has helped launch 9 businesses including sustainable packaging products, vinyl record production, mobile scheduling software, and a crowdsourced warehouse operator model.

Learn more about Edge success below, and click here to inquire about joining the program.

Productiv Edge Portfolio Companies

TemperPack Launch

TemperPack Launch

TemperPack (TP) was started as a college project between three high school friends while doing an undergraduate project. Two McGill ’14 Material Engineers, James McGoff and Charles Vincent, and Brian Powers, Wharton ’13 started making insulation for the bio-pharma industry as a project and got their first $10k sales while TP was still a student project. TP launched full time in 2014 and focused their business on attacking the e-commerce food market.

TP’s first products were meant to help e-commerce food companies reduce their packaging waste. These businesses were shipping sustainably sourced food in unsustainable packaging –often shipping more packaging than they were food. TP cold emailed many of the leading e-commerce companies, and often received emails back from the founders, tipping them off to how important an issue their potential customers faced.

Wanting to develop a truly green packaging insulation, TP worked with meal-kit leader Plated for 6 months and designed a fully compostable, 100% recyclable solution using jute which came from repurposed coffee bags, called Jutebox

Using this product, and contracts with early adopter customers, TP came to PI to help launch production on its first 100,000+ order of Jutebox products.

Productiv Edge

TP was introduced to PI as TP was looking for help in doing product assembly. PI immediately saw the potential of TP’s management team and took them on as a client. As a client, and portfolio company of Productiv Edge, PI provided TP the following support:

• Operational
  • Used PI team members to build jute and cotton assembly processes
  • Recruited and managed the local Richmond labor force
• Financial
  • Working capital support through extended payment terms – despite no TP credit history
  • Working capital support through material financing
  • Provided real estate at one of PI’s Richmond locations until TP moved into new building
• Technical & Engineering
  • Assisted with product development, helping TP gain competitive advantage by being the only packaging business who figured out how to sell jute
  • Problem solved issues that arose

What’s Next

TP has been growing rapidly and recently launched a cotton product this year and now offers three product options: recycled, compostable and recyclable. 

TP is expanding markets beyond e-commerce food and looking to add automation technology to improve their cost.

HandDrawn Records

From Hand Drawn Records to Hand Drawn Pressing

Hand Drawn Records (HDR) was started in 2011 by Dustin Blocker, a musician who was looking to get off the road traveling for gigs and start his own business. Dustin took his experience as an artist and began sharing those lessons with new artists. As those artists began to win awards, the label HDR took off.

In 2014, Dustin teamed up with Alex Cushing and in an effort to make ordering easier on their local indie artists, began matching up their artists with vinyl manufacturers. They saw an opportunity to move from brokering vinyl to manufacturing it. Demand in vinyl is projected to grow from 6% of the overall music market to 10% and a major supply deficit with only 30 plants worldwide capable of producing vinyl and a 16 – 24 week lead time to get a record in the queue.

Productiv Edge

Hand Drawn Pressing (HDP) was created as HDR was making the change from brokering vinyl records to manufacturing vinyl records. Dustin and Alex found a company in Canada, Viryl Technologies that was going to make the first fully automated vinyl record presses in over 30 years – and decided to buy two of them. It was at this critical juncture for HDP that they partnered with Productiv and Stephen Gould on launching HDP. The well rounded partnership included:

• Productiv
  • Financial: Productiv purchased the first two presses
  • Supply Chain: provides packaging, kitting and fulfillment for vinyl records

• Hand Drawn Pressing
  • Operations: Press installation, set-up and record manufacturing; purchase and operation of the ancillary machines which provide the steam and cooling process

• Stephen Gould
  • Supply Chain: Sources jackets for vinyl and the associated print
  • Real Estate: Provides facilities HDP to use

What’s Next

At the end of 2016, vinyl records outsold digital downloads for the first time. And further, as part of the vinyl resurgence, and HDP’s role in it, HDP was profiled in Forbes which can be found:  (http://www.forbes.com/sites/shawnsetaro/2016/11/30/hand-drawn-pressing).

According to Dustin, “Productiv has enabled HDR to stay specialists in making really great vinyl records, to zero in on audio quality control. We don’t have to worry about packaging, QA, shipping and receiving and we could never have scaled our fulfillment that fast to satisfy our current orders. And being able to tap into Productiv not only was helpful getting off the ground, but will also be vital as we scale.”