Plastics, Paper, and Packaging Manufacturing

It usually starts with the best of intentions. Sales wants to meet customer needs quickly. A deal is closed, expectations are high, and a commitment is made. The solution sounds right. The timeline feels reasonable. Everyone moves forward.  Then operations gets involved.  Questions begin to surface. Is that configuration actually buildable? Do we have the right components? Will this require a different routing or additional steps? The more complex the…

Anyone that has been in inventory optimization knows that there’s always something you seem to have too much of, sitting longer than expected. At the same time, something else runs short at exactly the wrong moment.  The conclusion many arrive to is to add a little more buffer, just to be safe. But, over time, those buffers stack up.  What started as a…

Picture this, your spreadsheet-based production schedule look rock solid, but, then out of the blue, a change happens and everything breaks down.  That change could be something like a material arriving late, a machine breaking down, a job taking much longer than expected. Suddenly, the schedule that made sense an hour ago no longer reflects reality, and someone has to step in and make…

Here’s a fact many of you probably already know. Production delays don’t always start on the shop floor.  In many cases, the disruption begins earlier, when materials don’t arrive when expected or when purchasing decisions are made without a clear view of what production really needs.   By the time it becomes visible, the issue has already worked its way into the schedule. Procurement is…

Most manufacturers have some form of cost data. The challenge is they don’t know how much they can trust it.  For most, reports are available, margins can be calculated, and variances can be tracked. Yet when questions come up about why the cost changed, the answers are not always clear. That gap matters as cost is not just something to report at the end of a period, it shapes pricing,…