Tag: Lead Times

Why care about Lead Times 

If you’re someone who has heard about the problems with the supply chain, you’ve also probably heard of lead times, as this can involve the packaging and material along with machinery times. If you’re looking to make a large machinery or various materials, but don’t want to wait for them for a few months, you can get this now, rather than down the road. It’s important to understand that due to the supply chain issues, it’s important that you place the orders early. You might need six months before it’s received in a timely fashion. 

If you wait to purchase something closer to the date, this can cause problems with it getting there, and tons of headaches. This is something that you should definitely ensure, especially if you want something to arrive as needed. If you’re curious about the materials and equipment, you should make the order well in advance. You may wonder why the lead times are so long though, and we’ll go over the issue with lead times currently, and what you can do. 

Why they’re so long 

This is something that is happening more often because of what’s going on in the world. Lead times of course, are the time it takes for something to arrive after placing orders. They’re essential because if you don’t consider these, it’ll cause the materials and machinery to not be there in time. It’s not super uncommon for buyers to ask about orders, and oftentimes, when you’ve got a lead time for product packaging, you can get this anywhere from a couple of weeks to up to half a year out. 

In most situations, letting the buyers know about this will help, as they can decide whether or not they can purchase something, based on what the lead times say. If you wait a few weeks before getting the items, then they may have to wait even longer. If you don’t do it right away, you may upset the customers too, since they’ll ask just why they can’t get something super quick. 

The extensive amount of lead times are becoming more common, and if you want to make sure that you don’t have that conversation, it’s important to early on. However, if the buyer understands that, they’ll also talk about the frustration of this, and you may want to expedite this, but let’s face it, that’s nearly impossible for most of the people. 

That is why if you don’t want to be in the position where you’ve got angry customers, making purchases a few weeks, or even months beforehand ensures everything arrives in a timely manner. 

The current lead times 

It depends basically on the material, and the current climate. The lead time for instance on packaging may be up to four weeks, but for some machinery and other packaging, it can be up to six months, and this is something that you’ll want to look at based on each case-by-case basis. The elements that impact this are something that you should be mindful of. Black swan events, disruptions to the supply chain, war, material shortage, and health crisis can all affect it. 

It can also be because of force majeure which basically liberates the distributor and the manufacturer in the event a black swan event. In this case, they may not get to customer’s orders until something is over. The best thing to do in that case is order ahead of time, order beforehand, and then stay abreast of the recent changes, especially if you are worried about how lead times will impact repute too. 

Operational Costs in Packaging 

The cots that are there are important. Obviously, it’s going to take money to make things go around, but knowing these costs will help with reduction of overhead and improving the aspects of such.Here, we’ll go over some of the different ways for you to be proactive in the way that you handle your operational packaging costs, and also to make it simpler for you too. 

What Factors Should Co Packers Be aware of When Purchasing 

Obviously, when you’re purchasing packaging, there are certain factors that play a huge part of this, and when you design a line of packaging, you need to focus on the raw materials, the staffing and automaton, and also the requirements for the flexibility of this line too. 

How to Plan the Line 

When planning the line, you want to make sure you do it in a way that’s efficient.  Maximizing the SKUs that one can run is probably the one of utmost importance. This is because you can choose options that are specific to machines, creating effective and quick forms of changeovers that are repeatable each time. 

You want to also think about the conveyance design.

Quick and accurate, or even reputable types of changeovers are good for conveying a system, allowing for more efficient startups of the next one of the SKUS on the line. 

The process of choosing the correct packaging happens super early, especially when looking at products that customers wish to run and build. You want to look at the different sizes of the bags that they wish to run, along with different operational factors that’ll slow this down. 

Identifying all of these applications and the process of sales ensures that the issues get fully mitigated from the start.

Of course, ensuring that the equipment is capable as well for changeovers that are quick is important too. Packaging equipment manufacturers want to have quick turnovers, but some of them aren’t very good, or they have almost no mechanical aspects. 

Machines are supposed to change over quickly and brilliantly. They are fully automated too in many cases, so you don’t have to have a maintenance guy in there all the time just to adjust something. 

Once the recipe gets programmed, there isn’t much to do in terms of changeover, besides choosing the correct recipe. This automated system handles the changeover aspects for one to use, which is great for the overall success of such. 

What to Consider when Automating Processes 

Obviously, when you use an automaton, it does drive down some of the costs of labor. 

But the reality is that the skills necessary for proper regulation of the facility in order to troubleshoot and maintain this equipment is there instead 

Think about the environment that you’re trying to put together.  This is especially true post-pandemic, with more and more people working away from each other, and less manual types of operations. 

It’s better in the long haul for many, but there are some unique costs associated with that type of automaton that one has to also look at, and factor in as well. 

When you work with co-packers that have been around for a bit, installing new and great software, there are costs for integration and different types of parts. The plant does have to pay for this to upgrade the rest of such.

Putting together the variety of operational costs offers one a better understanding of the types of costs that are there, and furthermore can help those with pants make the correct decisions that’ll ultimately benefit their company by manifold and help them make sound decisions.