Deciding on the right packaging partners is an important step for any company shipping products. There are several key factors to evaluate when picking providers to ensure your packaging and shipping needs will be fully met. Selecting the wrong vendors can lead to quality issues, delays, and excess costs that disrupt operations and disappoint customers. Taking a comprehensive approach to vetting potential partners upfront pays dividends down the road.
Quality Materials and Production Capabilities
The materials used by your EPS supplier as well as their production capabilities should be top-of-mind when vetting vendors. According to the experts at Epsilyte, important considerations include:
- Variety of packaging materials offered: Can they provide everything needed whether it is cardboard, plastic, Styrofoam, etc.?
- Material quality and durability: Can their materials properly protect products through transit and warehouse storage?
- Speed and scalability of production: How fast can packaging be created? Can they scale production up or down as order volumes fluctuate?
- Custom packaging options: Do they have the ability to create tailored packaging suited to specific products if needed?
Evaluating partners on these factors will ensure you select suppliers capable of consistently meeting business needs.
Responsiveness and Adaptability
In today’s fast-changing business climate, you need partners who can quickly adapt. Key responsiveness and adaptability factors consist of:
- Speed of initial response: How quickly do they provide quotes and respond to inquiries?
- Turnaround times for orders: How fast can they turn orders around?
- Flexibility to changing requirements: Can they handle unexpected changes or custom requests at the last minute if required?
- Capability to scale responsiveness to order volumes: Will quick turnaround and flexibility remain if order volumes grow exponentially?
Selecting responsive, nimble partners is key so you can rapidly react to and address business needs as they evolve.
Costs and Cost Optimization
While important considerations, partners should do more than just offer the lowest overall costs. Smart suppliers will provide recommendations on how to optimize costs across packaging, shipping and transit. Competent partners should:
- Offer competitive base pricing while avoiding cutting corners.
- Continuously develop methods to reduce costs like airplane delivery instead of trucking.
- Advise on balancing costs across materials, production and transit.
The goal of prudent partners is not necessarily to be the absolute lowest-cost option but rather to help strategize on optimizing total supply chain costs.
Industry Expertise and Continuous Innovation
Packaging is an industry in perpetual flux, with new materials, production methods, transit networks amongst continuous change. Partners to seriously evaluate should demonstrate:
- Deep domain expertise and specialization.
- Processes to constantly research and understand industry shifts.
- Capacity to regularly invest in innovations around materials, equipment, and processes.
- Application of the latest innovations that can generate client business value.
Selecting specialized experts who relentlessly keep innovating ensures you benefit from the latest industry best practices and thinking.
Cultural Fit and Shared Values
As with any partnership, cultural alignment and shared values are key. Important considerations around fit consist of:
- Ethical, sustainable practices: Look at their values and practices around ethics, communities, and the environment.
- Attitude and way of operating: Evaluate if their work ethic, attitude and overall way of operating fits your company’s culture.
- Vision alignment: Assess if future ambitions and perspectives align.
Vetting cultural fit avoids relationships misaligned on priorities and ways of working.
Conclusion
Evaluating packaging partners across these critical areas will lead to relationships where they evolve into trusted advisors helping to create business value. Do in-depth diligence during selection assessing capabilities, responsiveness, cost performance, industry expertise and culture: your company’s growth counts on making the packaging decisions that best serve evolving products and customer needs over the long term.
