News

Packaging category procurement belongs to the customized procurement of consumer goods in industrial product procurement.

1. Enterprises generally do not attach importance to the procurement of packaging categories.

The packaging category generally accounts for a small share of procurement, with industrial enterprises accounting for about 2% of packaging materials, and consumer enterprises accounting for 10% -30% of packaging material procurement. Industrial enterprises pay particular attention to the procurement management of packaging materials because the packaging amount is not high in their procurement share, which will be handed over to the user department, such as the production department or logistics department, for leadership.

2. Missing management documents.

Enterprises that do not attach importance to packaging materials also encounter many problems when switching packaging suppliers, mainly manifested as a lack of management documents, such as no drawings, controlled samples, product technical specifications, material specifications, process flow diagrams, etc. Once a new supplier is introduced, you can only standardize the drawings, processes, etc. with the old supplier, and the old supplier will not cooperate, making it difficult to introduce competition. Severe cases can cause disconnection, etc.

3. Flexible supply design

When it comes to planning, no enterprise's plan is accurate. Standard product procurement can easily achieve procurement plan changes based on plan changes. However, the changes in customized products, especially packaging materials, are affected by the purchase volume of each batch. For example, a clothing company needs to temporarily add 100 packaging bags, and the supplier needs to prepare materials and batch production, at least 1000, and at the fastest, it takes 2 days. This requires us to do a good job in standardized management of product specifications, raw materials, and production processes, so that we can supply demand as market demand changes.

4. Difficulty in price reduction

Most companies have a limited amount of packaging materials and a large variety of difficult to manage. In recent years, with the rise in prices of bulk raw materials, packaging materials have also made great strides. It is expected that prices will continue to fluctuate by more than 30% in the next five years compared to now. At this time, it is difficult to implement price reductions. Only by putting effort into scheme design, supplier integration, material standardization, process standardization, and manufacturing scale (more detailed explanations will be provided later), existing suppliers will become increasingly competitive in terms of price. Packaging suppliers originally did not have much market competitive advantage and are a vulnerable group in the supply chain.

5. High service costs

For industrial enterprises with limited quantity and variety of packaging materials, flexible supply is also required, which is a great challenge for packaging manufacturing enterprises. Enterprises with scale and high degree of equipment automation have weak flexible service capabilities. This weakness is not something that large-scale enterprises themselves are willing to do, but rather constrained by their flexible organizational design and service investment outside of production and manufacturing. For example, manufacturing enterprises are willing to invest in the progressiveness of equipment automation, but they are not conscious and prepared to invest in warehousing, logistics and software.

Small scale enterprises have low levels of production automation, weak product quality assurance, and although services are "on call", they are all "manual" services with a good attitude but do not solve problems!

Therefore, the field of packaging will give rise to the emergence of many one-stop service providers. In this ecosystem, one-stop service providers fill the capacity for flexible services, and Ant Supply Chain applies digital capabilities to help users from packaging demand initiation to product design, standard processes, flexible manufacturing, intelligent warehousing, logistics delivery, and integrated packaging production lines to achieve green and intelligent manufacturing.