Anticipate – Our leading CPG customers are focusing on improving the quality of data for predicting, using internal and external sources, as well as leading indicators when possible. For example, how do recent weather or economic conditions impact volumes for particular SKUs, and how can we use that to anticipate in the future?
Collaborate –It’s amazing how much coordination is needed within our large CPG organizations, much less externally with partners. Our well-organized customers use Teams, Slack, Ariba and ZOOM to communicate and coordinate. In several cases our project coordinators work directly in our customers’ ERP systems, and some of our customers choose to use our Nulogy system to retrieve inventory data in real time. At a minimum, our project coordinators are in constant contact with our customers’ various contacts – ranging from supply chain managers, to sourcing managers, to marketing leads – to share data, plan, anticipate, coordinate and react. Keys to success are teamwork, coordination, proactivity.
Adjust – A growing number of our customers are virtual organizations and rely on our agility for all execution. On the other hand, some of our more established CPG customers are exceptional at using external partners to augment their production teams. Either way, next-gen co-packers are set up to be highly agile and can easily go from setup to production to shipping in days or weeks. We do that through experience, proven processes, standby capacity, onsite expertise and staffing scale and redundancy. Being highly agile is in our DNA.
Amplify – Finally, we’re seeing more and more customers opt for using two+ facilities to co-pack, as doing so can double the output overnight and position the inventory as close as possible to supply lines and customers.