The benefits of using a single-source packaging supplier

When we first start talking to a new customer, one of the questions we’ll usually ask is where they’re currently buying their packaging, and the answer can sometimes take a while.

Boxes might come from one supplier, tape from another and protective packaging from somewhere else. Machinery has been bought separately; warehouse supplies are ordered by another department, and then there are a handful of other suppliers used for the odd product here and there. Before you know it, a business can be buying packaging from five, ten or even more different places. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this; it often happens gradually as a business grows, but the problem is that nobody ever really stops to look at the whole picture.

Working with a single-source packaging supplier isn’t simply about putting all your orders through one company. Done properly, it’s about making packaging easier to buy and manage, and giving your supplier a much better understanding of your full packaging needs.

How much packaging are you actually buying?

This can be a surprisingly difficult question for some businesses to answer. When several departments order independently from different suppliers, there isn’t always a clear view of what’s being bought or how much is being spent. One team might be ordering boxes. Another is buying tape and stretch film. Someone else is responsible for protective packaging. Each individual order might look perfectly reasonable, but nobody is looking at the combined spend.

Bringing all purchases together gives you a much clearer picture. It also gives your packaging supplier the opportunity to look across everything you’re buying rather than treating each product as a separate order. There might be products that could be standardised across different departments. You might be buying similar items from several suppliers at different prices. Or there could be opportunities to order differently and benefit from better price breaks. You can’t always spot those opportunities when everything is being bought separately.

Fewer suppliers mean fewer things to manage.

Every supplier added creates a little bit of work. There’s the purchase order, the invoice, the delivery and the person you need to contact if something hasn’t turned up. One supplier isn’t much work. Neither is two. But when five or six departments are all ordering packaging from different places, it can quickly become a lot of separate orders, deliveries and invoices being dealt with across the business.

We see this when we visit customers; often, nobody has deliberately created a complicated purchasing process. It’s simply grown that way over time. Bringing more of your packaging together can make the day-to-day side of buying it much simpler. You have fewer suppliers to deal with, fewer relationships to manage and one team that already understands what you buy.

It isn’t the most exciting packaging improvement we’ll ever recommend, but the person responsible for processing all those invoices will probably thank you for it.

You get a supplier who actually knows your business.

For us, this is one of the biggest benefits. If you buy one box from a supplier every six months, they’re unlikely to know much about what you do beyond the product code on your order. When we look after more of a customer’s packaging, we naturally get to know their business better.

We learn which products they use regularly, when their busy periods are and which items they can’t afford to run out of. We understand what they’re packing and the problems they’ve had in the past. That knowledge becomes particularly useful when something changes.

If a customer introduces a new product, for example, we don’t start the conversation from scratch. We already know something about their operation, the packaging they use and what matters to them.

One supplier doesn’t have to mean one-size-fits-all.

There’s sometimes an assumption that consolidating packaging means reducing everything down to a limited range of standard products, but that isn’t how we see it.

A business might need everyday boxes and tape alongside bespoke printed packaging, specialist protective materials and packaging machinery. Those are very different requirements, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily need five different suppliers to provide them.

A good single-source supplier should be able to bring together products from different manufacturers and find the right option for each requirement. Sometimes that will be something straightforward and off-the-shelf. Other times, we’ll need to visit the customer, see the product for ourselves and develop something specifically for it. The benefit is that the customer still has one team and a single point of contact to call.

Stock becomes easier to think about.

Packaging has an annoying habit of taking up a lot of space. Boxes are probably the most obvious example – ordering larger quantities can give you access to better pricing, but then you have to find somewhere to put them all. For customers where we manage a larger proportion of their packaging, stock holding can become part of the wider conversation.

Rather than the customer filling their own warehouse with months’ worth of packaging, we can hold agreed stock and deliver it as it’s needed. That can give them the benefit of ordering in larger quantities without having to keep everything on their own site. It also means we can see how quickly products are being used and order and replace them as needed.

Is using one packaging supplier right for everyone?

Not necessarily – there will always be situations where a business needs a highly specialised product or has an existing supplier relationship that works extremely well. Consolidating suppliers shouldn’t mean changing something that already works just so you can say everything comes from one place.

It’s about looking at whether the number of suppliers you’re managing still makes sense. If you’re buying packaging from ten different companies, each one providing something genuinely different and giving you great service, there might be nothing to fix.

We get to know you.

We know what you buy, how you work and what’s important to your operation. So when something changes, you have someone you can call who already understands the background. And when it comes to packaging, sometimes having one person to call is worth quite a lot.