What are the customer requirements? requirements? How does this affect their relationship relationship with suppliers?
Interview with Corinne Loustalet, co-founder of Packitoo, and Frédéric Charlet, Consulting Director for the development of agri-food SMEs and ETIs in France.
Corinne: "When you were Sales Director for an agri-food ETI, how did the expectations of your own customers (supermarkets, delicatessens or other distribution channels) evolve to develop your sales?"
Frédéric: "The expectations of our customers, mainly supermarket distributors, have evolved towards a significant development of their own brands, particularly "specialized" brands, which has resulted in a multiplication of production runs and a reduction in the quantitative importance of each one. The same applies to shelf-ready, ready-to-sell and point-of-sale boxes, with each major retailer following its own business model (I'm thinking in particular of the Discounters) and constantly striving to differentiate itself from the competition. I've just mentioned private labels, but the phenomenon remains the same for national brands: more and more segmentation of the offer (and therefore of the number of packages) and a promotional offer where it's no longer enough to simply affix a "PROMO" sticker, but where it's becoming necessary to develop increasingly refined, single-use packaging and displays."
2 - How important is packaging for your products to be listed by the buying group?
This is a key point, both in terms of the company's ability to meet the customer's packaging requirements (stand-up pouches, trays, etc.) and to meet new packaging development deadlines. And all at the right price, of course! What's more, technical demands are becoming increasingly sophisticated, particularly in the areas of recyclability and ergonomics for consumers who are increasingly mobile and eco-responsible. In short, we need to be able to offer a wide range of packaging options, always innovative and very quickly.
3 - How did you organize your company around this packaging issue?
We had set up a packaging purchasing department with a packaging engineer and an assistant. Their role was to define specifications, reference packaging suppliers, negotiate prices and seek innovation. Marketing was responsible for the technical follow-up of packaging development, while the supply chain was in charge of procurement. It was clear that the packaging unit spent a large part of its time calculating and entering packaging prices into the system.
4 - What were your main pains about this?
We suffer from the discrepancy between our supermarket customers' demands for rapid price feedback and our suppliers' sometimes lengthy delays in calculating packaging prices. And we're under increasing pressure to reduce packaging design and development times, while at the same time having to deal with fixed, unchangeable in-store launch dates. The result is constant tension, frustration and the feeling that we'll never be ready on time, despite the quantity and quality of the team's work. Not to mention the potential penalties invoiced by distributors if launch deadlines are not met...
5 - How do you think HIPE can meet these challenges?
HIPE makes it possible to increase flexibility and thus responsiveness to price calculation requests, compress the total "time to market", and thus accelerate sales development. The HIPE solution also opens the door to other packaging solutions not previously envisaged. Finally, it should free up our packaging department's time for retrieving price quotations, so that they can devote more time to their key mission, which is, in my opinion, to "hunting" for innovations in the world of packaging.
6 - Generally speaking, do you think that digital transformation is the way forward for packaging manufacturers?
To say that digital transformation - the convergence of IT and information technology - is fundamental to today's businesses may sound like a cliché. But how many of them have actually taken this step? As someone who is very much involved in international trade, I can't help but be alarmed at how far behind our national companies are when I see the level reached by foreign competition, particularly in the so-called emerging countries. This transformation is at the crossroads of many areas of competitiveness and efficiency: cost reduction, shorter lead times, better collection and circulation of information for more horizontal management performance... In my field of business, the gains are immense and, without mentioning them all, I would like to mention the one that seems to me to be the most strategic: bringing together the consumer, the company and its products. This makes it possible to build a genuine, long-term relationship with the consumer, to accompany him throughout his purchasing journey and his life. And to transform them into real players in the sustainable development of your company (for example, product co-creation) and of society as a whole.