When you ask to be kept safe what do you expect?

Is the word “safe” like the word “fair” one of those that get your blood boiling when someone else uses it because you know that it can only be achieved in relative rather than absolute terms and because you can’t guarantee absolute safety or absolute fairness and you are going to be branded a liar or a fool if you try.

None of us is, or ever will be, safe because we will all die. Fairness is much the same, as can be illustrated by use of a set of scales with both pans empty. They will eventually settle on one side or the other.

The demand to be safe is a current pandemic preoccupation for those who are afraid to leave lock-down and re-enter the wider world or allow their children to do so. The reluctance demonstrates a childlike need for reassurance from Mummy’s apron that the dangers outside will be manageable. The concerns tend to ignore the risks inherent in staying at home where domestic abuse, damaged educational development and damaged physical and mental health, not to forget domestic and DIY accidents, are real and statistically significant.

Boris, in the guise of Mummy’s apron, wants us to use that rarest of all assets, common sense. Do we dare to take the risk?

 

The financial results for April were encouraging considering the pandemic and all. Boris has told us to get back to work and we must now be alert to save lives and the morning briefings will end with the company song in which washing hands, using gel and keep our distance all get a mention! Meanwhile the efforts with the new and urgent product have met the customer’s expectations and most jobs are progressing to plan. But we are still struggling with long term quality and productivity issues. We continue to make the same mistakes, no one seems to own the productivity numbers.

My blog last week has resulted in a worthy and lengthy report with a number of actions but I’m not sure that we have got to the root causes. I hope that a review of our policy and process concerning complaints will yield some improvements in the way our customer perceive our quality performance. However, an improvement in the production to one with zero defects needs something more than this. It needs real engagement with the task of identifying and eliminating the causes of defects.

In a very similar way our attention to productivity is still a focus on getting the product out rather than getting it out within the expected number of operator hours. Having said that, the line speeds are up but so too are the stoppages and the extra manning for overtime and re-work. Decisions are not being made with the productivity consequences in mind and it is becoming evident that the simple arithmetic in the blog last week is not simple enough for too many who are accountable for performance. I have decided to re-group, revise the tools we use to present the key data and begin the long march to gain the ground with productivity that we have with with line speeds.

Last week I felt that I had taken appropriate and decisive action in response to our biggest and oldest customer’s complaint concerning some leaking bottles that one of his important customers was annoyed about. Whilst making it clear that Operations were accountable for handling the complaint, resolving the underlying issues and completing a report on this and some other apparently outstanding issues, I intervened. I strongly suggested that we send our van with a replacement pallet of product (all previously checked for leaks) and collect the offending pallet by return. As this was all in less than 24 hours of our receiving the complaint I was feeling pleased with myself. We had responded quickly, kept the customer informed, maybe set ourselves a new standard for responsiveness and would have the evidence with which to conduct a prompt and thorough investigation.

I was conscious that we now had a handful of complaints about at least two different examples of leaking bottles, one a long term issue, and I had the feeling that this would be a weeping sore with the customer forever referring to it unless we could act decisively and effectively.

On Monday when we inspected the returned bottles we found none was leaking, although many were dirty, and the pallet was 8 bottles short. So we had no evidence to work with. Then we were told that there was a history of complaints from this source relating to leaks from similar bottles emanating from either the seal inside the cap or from the point where bottle handle is connected to the bottle. This was the first that we were aware of  a significant history. They claimed that cost was a significant one to them: “we need to employ someone to deal with these leakers”. Meanwhile we inspected every bottle of the same products held in our stock. We found no leakers.

On Thursday someone from the Management Team visited to collect the leaking bottles and to talk with the people concerned in order to gather evidence. Beforehand we asked how many bottles were to be collected (to help us decide whether to go by car or to use the van again). We were told that the number was nineteen or twenty. We would need the van then. When the van returned on Thursday afternoon there were seven bottles returned, so we could have used a car!

A detailed assessment of the returned bottles remains to be made but they included examples of both forms of leak: a failure of the bottle at the handle junction and a failure of the induction heat seal of the cap. The visit elicited some useful information about how the bottles are packaged by the customer when sending them out by courier. If you have ever stood by as a courier driver loads his van when collecting parcels you will know that care in transit is very low on any courier’s list of priorities. To be fair it was much the same when I worked as a student in a Royal Mail parcels office one Christmas.

The good news is that our prompt and proactive action is earning some goodwill from our primary customer but this will be short-lived if we can’t produce a satisfactory explanation and a sustained resolution.

The problem seems to be threefold:

• a bottle defect with regards to a small hole that can appear in the bottle near to the handle when it is manipulated,
• a cap sealing defect that occurs when the filled and capped bottle is passed under the induction heat sealer
• a leak or damage that occurs when the pallet of cartons is shipped and mishandled when loading or unloading.

We have direct control of only one of these problems, the IHS sealing, and with that one it is difficult to eliminate the defect except with expensive 100% checking. This where strict set-up procedures and statistical process control need to be applied. Not a quick fix I fear!

The defective bottle is a matter for the bottle manufacturer and we have found that we have very little leverage there, particularly as by the time that the defect is identified we have lost any access to the original production lot data because we don’t track that data for packaging components. This is where we need to re-consider the cost v benefit of capturing that data.

The damage during shipment and handling is in our control in so far as we select the haulage company and we execute the pallet wrapping. The haulier has already agreed to provide an above industry standard of compensation for damage and we can upgrade our palletisation to provide corner-boards and double thickness of stretch film wrapping. We could also consider a 100% check on the leak integrity of all shipments to that particular customer until we have more data or we have recovered credibility with the customer.

Additionally we could adopt a more assertive stance with this, and possibly all, of our customers concerning the handling of complaints. For example we could apply a policy of responding to complaints with an immediate substitution provided that the complaint is made within 48 hrs of the original goods receipt or the delivery note is marked as “arrived damaged” and the original item is returned promptly for inspection or retained for our collection. Maybe in this day of the “app for everything” we should arrange an easy to use complaints portal that will help us to capture the data more reliably and to ensure that replacements are delivered and defects returned to us more quickly. In this way we may be able to tackle our own shortcomings, identify and address those of our supply-base and eliminate the running sores of “we always get these leaks”.

I wonder what our Operations report into the issues will come up with this week?

The Covid-19 regime seems to have settled into a pattern with everyone who can do so working from home and everyone else doing their best to maintain 2m social distance. My morning briefings are a little more histrionic these days but everyone is responding positively and there is a steady demand for the in-house sanitizing gel. We felt that as everyone has been so positive we would provide a buffet lunch for all on Thursday as part of the Employee of the Month ceremony. Perhaps we will make a tradition of it, and it was impressively arranged with everyone allowed into the canteen, strictly one at a time to collect their food and then out through another door to sit in glorious sunshine each 2 metres apart under the woollen gaze of the “safety bear”.

As we sat there eating, the long-awaited delivery of 15tonnes of a new product arrived from France where it had been transhipped from Japan. It took until 14:30 to get the filling job started and by 17:00 we had filled only 19 boxes of 12 kg. This was disappointing but understandable at this stage of the learning curve.

What I found really disappointing was that when I looked in on the Production Manager at 17:00 for her progress report neither of the Supervisors that had been involved in the filling line set up and operation were present and the Production Manager did not have at her fingertips the average line-speed achieved or the productivity in units per operator minute for this vitally important high profile job. No-one seemed to know or care about the “numbers”.

As I had said to the Operations Director a week previously knowing the “numbers” and using them to make decisions in running the line to optimise performance and maximise productivity is something that I expect of both the Production Manager and her Supervisors. These should be a commonplace part of discussions on the production line, in team briefings and reports to management. Apart from safety and product quality the “numbers” should be the first priority.

The calculation is straightforward and delivers some harsh news:

Units produced un	Line run time mins	No. of operators	Line speed bpm	Productivity units/op min
N	T	P	N/T	N/(T x P)
228	150	4	1.52	0.38
900	150	3	6	2

The speed achieved was only 1.52 bpm and with four operators yielded a productivity of 0.38 units per operator minute some 19% of value that had been built into the costing for the product that had assumed 3 operators would be able to fill 6 bottles per minute. Clearly something needs to be done to change things.  Firstly, to examine why it has not been possible to fill the bottles faster. Is it a flow issue or something mechanical in transferring the bottles? Is the filling machine the right one for the job by comparison with similar filling operations with other products? Secondly, to question why it is really necessary to use four operators rather than 3? (If we had used 3 operators and achieved the same output the productivity would have been 0.51units/op min. or 25% of target)

A ten-minute discussion of these points at 17:00 with the supervisors might mean that a new and better plan is set for Monday and by monitoring the numbers for the first 30 minutes on Monday we would know if the ideas are any good or if any alternative plan is required. We would also know if we would be able to meet our commitment to the customer for the completion of the job.

A similar issue of lack of an appreciation of the “numbers” had arisen during the week when a Supervisor decided to conduct the repacking of a liquid parallel import product from one 5litre bottle to another by pouring the liquid from one to the other rather than by decanting all of the in-bound bottles to a tank and then using a filling machine to fill into the outbound bottles. The Supervisor reasoned that by pouring from one to the other the pouring time would be the same as for decanting and the filling time would be saved. (or the decanting time would saved as the filling time would be the same). What he realised after the job was finished was that the bottle to bottle approach relies on the liquid viscosity being low enough that pouring under gravity would take the same time as filling by a pumped filler and overlooking that the decanting operation can have several bottles being emptied into the tank simultaneously.  If he had tested his assumptions by running say 20 bottles and timing the job and then comparing the productivity with what his experience would have told him about the decanting and filling speed he might have seen a comparison like the one below that tells him that the decanting route has more than double the productivity.

Units produced un	Line run time mins	No. of operators	Line speed bpm	Productivity units/op min
Bottle to bottle
N	T	P	N/T	N/T x P
20	30	2	0.667	0.333
Decant
100	60	1	1.667
Fill				0.714
100	40	2	2.500

Had we been repacking granules, the result might have been reversed but will the lesson of the “numbers” be learned?

Tomorrow we learn what Boris has in mind for us in the ongoing Covid-19 saga.

Whilst continuing under the new Covid-19 paradigm we have progressed our software a little, are reminded that we need to understand the customer’s customer’s requirements and must also address the importance of trust throughout the business.

So what went well this week? The experiment with the Production Manager and Operations Director taking turns to WFH has been largely successful, our electrician’s wife has presented us with a knitted bear that will be “Fred” our safety mascot which will feature in posters and reminders to maintain our social distance and we have not seen any loss of enthusiasm. The Pyrethrum powder blend has progressed well despite our needing to blend the three premixes before using them. Only 4 hours more before we finish all 14.5 tonnes of it. It was also a pleasure to be able to access our new manufacturing management software nearly six months after making the transition so I can explore it myself and begin to understand the user’s perspective.

I can also say that we have hand sanitizing gel as one of our achievements, the marker dye for a new customer is now in transit to Pakistan and Afghanistan, the parallel traders have their product and we have received all the packaging that we need to start the big urgent packing job that we won less than a month ago.

As I look back on the week I am left thinking about two main concerns: how to find a particular pallet box and how to communicate the importance of trust and trustworthiness throughout the business.

The pallet box is a tricky one but it is really only a manifestation of a much more significant general problem that is very difficult to solve even if you realise that it is a “known unknown” to use Mr Rumsfeld’s words. The problem occurs when the customer specifies something and you deliver it but the customer’s customer doesn’t like it and you are asked to do it again because the customer’s specification was not approved by his customer. Setting aside the question of who pays for the rework and the redesign and assuming that the relationship between all of the parties concerned is something that needs to be sustained, how should we ensure that we make something that both the customer and his customer wants?

The answer is in the questions that we should ask from the beginning of the enquiry and design development process. It is sometimes difficult to ask the questions if the customer doesn’t understand why the questions are necessary and may feel that they are impertinent or possibly invasive and suggestive of an unhealthy interest in his customer. The questions are especially important if the ultimate user is from a market sector or industry that is unfamiliar to you. You don’t know what you don’t know and so you don’t ask. When we were asked to use a box that would fit on a pallet on a racking space that is only 1600 mm high we didn’t think to ask if that was the only racking space that was to be used, and missed that half of them were 1400 mm high. In fact the details of the pallet to be used and the way it is to be wrapped, strapped and labelled can prove to be a significant factor in the successful completion of a project yet they may not feature in the initial enquiry at all. To many customers all pallets are the same and are invisible.

It is probably true that you can never have too much information about what the ultimate consumer needs from the product that you are making. If your customer doesn’t want to pay you to provide it, that’s another thing!

The importance of trust throughout the business is enormously important. It is something that is more powerful than any number of contractual documents, written agreements and procedures. It lies at the heart of an individual’s and an organisation’s integrity. This issue arose this week in connection with two recent incidents in which two different supervisors were involved in damaging equipment whilst driving a fork lift truck. The fact that they were supervisors is all the more disappointing because neither of them reported the incident to their immediate superior nor reported it as a “near miss”.

The specifics of the cases are unimportant in so far as they did not involve any injury but did result in damage that not only had some financial significance but also would, if unnoticed, have delayed production on the next occasion that the equipment was used. The dereliction of the duty to report the damage is thus more significant than the accidents that caused them. The duty to report damage is enshrined in procedures and the employee handbook as is the duty to report “near misses”. So what has this to do with trust?

In my view the failure to report the incident has two links with trust. One, that fear of the disciplinary consequences suggest a possible lack of trust in the business’s ability to deal with the accident appropriately and fairly. Two, that the business has no reason to trust that the individual would fulfill any of their responsibilities in accordance with instructions and procedures.

The first contains an irony that by seeking to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions the supervisors automatically undermine the right of their own subordinates to expect fair treatment if they were involved in a similar incident. The second strikes at the heart and soul of the whole business because if we can’t trust our employees to follow the rules and procedures how can our customers trust the business to make their products correctly and to treat them honestly? It is laughable to imagine that our accreditation under ISO9001 is a substitute for the trust that we will do as we promise. The ISO certificate is no more than a paper confirmation that trust is possible, only the behaviour everyday by everyone of us makes that trust substantial.

The second 4 day week passed without disaster but some annoying lessons must be learned as a balance to the achievements. My concerns of April 5 about PPE are now more acute.

So what were the achievements? First we finished the repacking into re-pulpable bags. We now have a brand-new hot melt gun and we have shown that we operate with 61% of the amount of glue that we had originally costed for. It has brought the cost of glue below the cost of bags! We also finished the second of the parallel trade jobs but I haven’t seen the profitability report yet. Third we completed the premix blend for a new pesticide powder job that has come from an old customer that hasn’t worked with us for a while and that promises to be a significant annual tonnage. Finally we made two IBCs of bulk hand sanitizer for a major client who had been trying to get us to do so for some time. Getting the right formulation to produce a clear product of the right pH and viscosity had cost some time after we eventually had secured enough of the propyl alcohol. The mixing process proved to be time-consuming and the two batches took about 12 hours in all. A classic example of a learning curve whereby the first took 8 hours and the second 4. With preparation and an order for 5-10 IBCs we could probably get the cycle time down to 2 hours.

And the annoying lessons? Well the re-pulpable bag filling job was concluded with a 2% loss of yield. This is a significant mass in a 20 tonne order and is believed to have come from a failure to count the bags accurately into the shipping boxes. Instructions to use a “tally” system to log the count and the failure to implement an interim reconciliation system by the team or supervision are obvious lessons that we seem to be doomed to learn the hard way. The other lessons concern the time it takes to move from the production of the paperwork to the completion of the production preparations to the completion of the first batch. The risk assessment,  communication, equipment assembly, cleaning, weighing, charging, blending, discharging all seem to take an age. The lesson is perhaps to measure these steps, standardise them and rigorously build them into future production plans! In the case of the hand sanitizing gel our customer told us that his customer had cancelled the order just as we were completing the first batch. Now he wants us to pack it off into 25litre bottles so I suppose we got some extra work even if it leaves us with two unhappy customers.

The subject of PPE is another story. The world and his wife now know that PPE is important and that it involves masks and gowns used by the angels of the NHS and care services. We use PPE too and we use the same sort of FFP2 and FFP3 masks and some of the same gloves as the front-line NHS people and we use it to protect our people from fine powder particles entering their lungs. We have not been able to purchase masks through our usual channels or by any internet sources for over three weeks. In view of the difficulties being experienced by the Health Secretary this is not surprising. We don’t stand a chance of receiving anything until the NHS gets what it needs.

So as I sit and watch the Ministers squirming under the incessant attack over the lack of one sort of PPE or another I actually have huge sympathy for them. Why? Because the moaners are all angry and afraid and because they seem to have no perception of the both the complexity and sheer scale of the numbers involved. All they know is that the cupboard is bare, and like my people, they expect the cupboard to be refilled immediately. It is their job to consume and be safe and it is my job to provide. After all I should have known well in advance how many of each item would be required and where to obtain them and how to get them delivered to the right place irrespective of the absence of any realistic forecast of the number and timing of the requirement. I should have known that the ultimate source of many of the key components for these apparently simple but actually quite sophisticated items, all made and tested to a rigorous and seemingly immutable standard, is in China, which has only recently recovered and the USA which has closed its gates.

If there are 1.5 million employees in the NHS and 1.6 million care staff and every one of them needs a new mask every day then the Government needs to receive and distribute 3.1 million masks every day or 21.7 million masks every week. This is a big number. We don’t have a manufacturing base in this country for that sort of quantity of that sort of item at that rate of output. We might be able to create one, but not overnight or in a few days, and that assumes that we would have access to the materials and be able to approve the product to the immutable standards required in the same time. Why? Because in the complex world of manufacturing today we are not an island! We source our materials from anywhere in the world that can provide us with the best price and performance outcome. We are often sole sourced for these things for reasons of economy of scale. We operate just in time systems based on reliable forecasts of requirements so that we don’t need to hold large expensive and deteriorating stocks of things.

I expect that the global experience of the pandemic will result in changes in the sourcing strategies of many industries that have suffered from supply interruptions. The government may choose to do something itself for those items which have now gained such strategic significance. It will be interesting to see how that can be done in a capitalist economy without an enormous amount of waste.

How many remember the return of SS Canberra at the end of the Falklands War? The flotilla of small boats following the ship up Southampton Water as she berthed at the Ocean terminal, decks lined with soldiers and the small boats featuring well endowed young women bare breasted in their admiration for the achievement.

How long was it before those same men were let go from their service to survive unsupported in the community with their burns, their PTSD, their flashbacks? We didn’t need them any more, they were too expensive.

As we stand each Thursday evening clapping and banging the saucepans we need to remember that sometime soon we will be complaining once more about queues, negligence, lack of openness, the cost and confusion that is inevitable in an organisation as large, diverse, and mostly unaccountable as our NHS, notwithstanding that it is generally regarded as a “good thing”. Who, after all, can say that they have not benefitted from it in some way? Our Prime Minister certainly has and he has made it very clear. He might have died without the care that he was given recently. Unfortunately that makes him compromised.

When the pandemic is brought under control and we start to count the cost and begin to plan to regain control of our public finances we will need to make a number of difficult decisions that will return us to choices between the “must have” and the “nice to have”, between the “spend today” and the “spend tomorrow”. We will need a leader as much then as we do today and we will need one that is not beholden to any particular interest group, one that can say the country needs this action and this contribution without bias or personal agenda.

We should be aware that when drugs gangs and particularly the primordial drugs gang, the Mafia, deliver food and medicines to the local community they do it to gain a strategic advantage not because they are really nice guys under the skin. The community is compromised in its efforts to defeat them in the future.

Of course the NHS and the Mafia are not the same but we won’t get either one to serve our community better in the future if we owe them our lives. We should be looking for the right leader to take us out of the recession! We should start today!

This week was the first of the two 4 day weeks that are Easter. The usual pattern is to cope with an expectation by customers that we can produce in four days what we normally do in five. To an extent this has continued despite the pandemic but at least the pressure is now focused on the agricultural sector because the lock-down has closed the garden centres. We are still very busy. We are still “social distancing”. The Prime Minister is just out of hospital, the NHS is short of PPE, over 10,000 have died and many are afraid.

The forward view of sales is causing me concern because the orders for the oil suspension product show a reduction of 100,000 litres for the first six months compared with the last two years and the customer for the seaweed retail sector is cutting his forecasts to delete the April and May sales. On the other hand the parallel trade repacking and labelling work is up and we have some surprisingly large and unexpected enquiries  from new customers and old for agchem work. Maybe these will compensate. Certainly the recently acquired repacking into pulpable bags is looking to be a growth area and the resumption of production with a new hot-melt glue gun is a technical achievement that I am proud of thanks to our electrical genius.

Apart from trying to adapt to new ways of working under the pandemic conditions this week has demanded a great deal of attention on a particular couple of parallel trade jobs. These came to us from a customer that swore they would never deal with us again some five years previously. The reasons behind such a declaration are bound up in the nature of the parallel trade, its time pressures and of course, the personalities involved. The pandemic had changed perspectives and time had passed. Maybe!

The two jobs that occupied my attention involved us in undertaking similar, but not identical processes, to those in jobs that we had done previously and in jobs that we are doing for other clients. Repacking from one container to another and re-labelling a container as a different brand. This is the essence of the parallel trade but of course, it is more complicated than that because there are legal restrictions and commercial considerations in what is also known as the “grey market”, as opposed to the “black market” which would obviously be a bad thing!

We have been doing this sort of work for twenty years and although it represents a small part of our turnover and is not particularly profitable it is all “grist to the mill” and helps to keep a team employed and available for the more profitable work. It also keeps some skills honed, removing labels, applying labels by hand, organising the job efficiently. It is part of what we do and it has taken me a while to learn how to do it without getting my fingers burned. This week I got too close to the fire.

First a lesson in economics. The “grey market” exists because someone can buy premium branded product cheaply enough that they can sell it again at a profit so that the farmer can buy it at a lower price than the premium branded product. In the process the product is changed from the premium brand to the parallel brand which involves someone like us making the re-labelling and re-packing changes necessary and doing so efficiently enough that there is enough margin left for the parallel trader to sell to the farmer at a profit. Obviously the price that is paid for the premium branded product is key to this working and there are several reasons why this branded product is available so cheaply: currency exchange rates, overstocking in a market, stock nearing its expiry date, adverse weather in a particular region leaving product unsold. One common factor to all of these reasons is time. Time is of the essence, so the parallel trader often knows who he will be selling to before he buys and the he expects the contractor like us to convert the goods as quickly as possible so that they can be applied to the farmer’s crop before the weather changes or the crop passes a critical stage.

Second a lesson in ethics. The owners of the premium brand take a dim view of the “grey market” because they don’t control it, because someone else is making money from the product that they have made, because their reputation might be damaged by the way their product is used in the field. The transition from premium brand to parallel brand could be an opportunity to infiltrate unregulated product into the field, to change the expiry date of a regulated product, to change the instructions for use so that it could be applied to a different crop or pest for which there has been no testing. At the same time, the premium brand owners are also the people who might benefit most from last year’s overstock being sold off to ensure that this year’s sales are maximised. Regulators in European and UK markets attempt to control some of these issues by requiring parallel traders to licence their parallel brands and link them to a specific premium brand citing the same crops and instructions for use and requiring that the labelling specifically uses the original product batch number and date of manufacture. The use of a similar chemical compound imported from China without any of the controls applied to the original premium brand is not permitted. These Regulations concerning the labelling were updated in 2015 and some parallel traders have expressed concerns that the obligation to use the original batch numbers enables the premium brander owners to track the route in the supply chain whereby the parallel trader came by the goods and so to control the supply.

After the Regulations were updated we wrote to our parallel trade clients making it clear that we would assist them in compliance with the Regulations by adopting  policies on coding re-labelled and re-packed product that reflected the Regulations.

The policies have been in operation since that time and we have not experienced any difficulties apart from the inconvenience of ensuring that we change the batch numbers and dates of manufacture as the input batches change.

We had started on the first of these new jobs when I realised that the client had specifically asked for a different coding policy and I had taken the job without challenging the matter. At the same time I also realised that the work content of the specific re-packing job was significantly greater and hence the job was slower than I had estimated. We were going to lose money and it was my fault for rushing the estimation step. We were also not doing what the client wanted and might not pay us at all! What to do?

The second job, which had not yet started, had a similar coding issue but also needed an additional blank label to be cut to size and applied over the residue of the original  branded label before applying the parallel label (we can’t always remove a label entirely at an economic rate so a cover-up label is used). This had not been part of the original enquiry but the extra cost still needed to be recovered.

With the client asking urgently for progress on the re-packing and re-labelling and I was unwilling to contravene the Regulations lest I become vicariously liable for the breach. This was an interesting test of my negotiation ability and a lesson to be learned when taking on a new client in partially familiar but simultaneously high pressure rapid-response circumstances. Time will tell.

The following is an extract of my thinking earlier concerning the first of the jobs as I prepared the paperwork.  I am eating some Cadbury’s Roses left over from Christmas. They are a technical marvel. Nine different chocolates each individually and perfectly shrouded in a flow-wrapped foil, every one precisely positioned in the foil and sealed with an easy to open tear point and perfectly sealed and then collected together in a beautiful and well-sealed pouch with the batch code and “best before date” printed with perfect clarity right in the middle of the white rectangle on the foil pouch. The simplicity and minimal packaging waste while maintaining the product security is a joy to behold and something to aspire to. How I would love to be able to produce such a product!

The contrast  in my mind is with the 80g pots of ***** that we are filling for ***** from the sophisticated 3 year old packs of **** that are soluble 20g sachets which are themselves packed in 4’s or 7’s in resealable foil pouches packed into cartons or cases. We are required to desecrate such sophistication to open and empty the soluble sachets through a worm-hole in the space-time continuum of 20 years earlier into plastic jars sealed with IHS caps with a self-adhesive label that leaves little or no room for the application of a batch and date code before being layered into a brown corrugated shipping carton. Only for us to grapple with the disposal of sachets, pouches and cartons left unwanted in the current century. Such is the daily compromise that we make as we mix and pack stuff in an effort to serve customers and grow the business. It is sometimes hard to keep the beautiful image of the Cadbury Roses in focus!

There are also strategic issues here: we should be looking for productivity improvements by use of cobots in this situation and also actions to manage the packaging waste better. Can we do it better? Will there be regulatory pressures to minimise the waste? Can and should we seek to influence the Authorities in changing the rules on parallel registrations to prohibit the repacking of product out of non-recyclable packaging? How would that work with the example above?

 

The Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic is clearly impacting on us all and many have commented that it will drive some significant and permanent changes in behaviour.

In particular, the technological advances that have made it easy to conduct conferences by Microsoft Teams or Zoom have tempted people to dream of downsizing their office space and of dramatically reducing the need for hours of commuting. I’m not so sure, and Mathew Paris in the Times today has definitely nailed his colours to the mast by suggesting that most of the changes that we have adopted in the last couple of weeks will not last long after the release from lock-down whenever it comes. The lessons, he thinks, won’t be learned at all.

My objections come from the frustrations that I feel at the barrier that this mode of working sets up between the individuals involved and also the isolation and disconnectedness that the individual feels working alone without the companionship of others with whom to share the daily aggravations and the minor problem-solving that goes on in a shared environment.

This second aspect has been highlighted in recent conversations with my daughter who spent two years working alone in Dubai, to set up a branch of her employer’s business there and also my sister-in-law who worked from home for over two years in a consultancy business and in studying for her PhD. I think that it is very important to be able to share a difficult experience with someone else, even if that sharing involves no more than to be present when the other person is having a stressful conversation with a difficult or demanding client and to be able to say, “well that sounded a tough one”. Or “he was a bit of a dick, I had one like that myself last week”. It can help to keep things in proportion, it can help to be able to share a problem-solving short cut for an IT  or procedural issue.

As a Manager I find it a problem to be struggling to hear what everyone is saying in the meeting and to have the feeling that not everyone is focusing on the topic under discussion. Maybe they are reading or answering emails at the same time. I can’t read their body language and I certainly find it very difficult to pick up on whether someone has something that they want to contribute but don’t want to hit the “hand up” tab. Even one on one conversations have a feeling of distance  where commitments are less firm and the eye to eye contact is much less certain.

Of course a quick question can be asked and answered better than by a phone call alone and in much less time that it would have taken to visit the other’s desk. Those are easier and may possibly have the downside of  being so easy that they become disruptive of the other person’s time.

In the end, I expect that the quick video call will become a very commonplace tool but that when important things need to be done and people need to be motivated and engaged, the most efficient process will be to do it in person, face to face. Those who don’t respect the need for personal contact will alienate themselves from colleagues and subordinates alike.

Our Digital Manager is doing her job when she points out that people who search on the internet for our services are more likely to look for “Packaging” services than “Packing” services. It is a matter of the use of English. What we do is packing, whereas packaging is the stuff that we pack stuff into but people get the word wrong and so they look for packaging and get all sorts of sites that supply boxes and bottles and tape and stuff but not us because we do packing. We are packers of packaging.

It seems pretty obvious that we should describe ourselves as “experts in packing into most sorts of packaging” but  then we get lumped into the huge pile of packaging suppliers and there are so many  different sorts of packaging our packing is actually into quite a limited range of packaging, but we don’t want to say that we are limited, do we?

Actually the packaging we use includes HDPE (High Density Poly Ethylene) and PET (Poly Ethylene Terephthalate) bottles from 50 ml to 25 litres as well as pails (or buckets) with lids from 1 litre  to 25 litres with closures (lids) of different sizes that are screwed in place, tamper-evident, child resistant or induction (or conduction) heat sealed. There can be trigger spray closures too, and we have a supplier who provides triggers that will meet Amazon’s no leak standard. That’s just for packing the liquids into. The powders are another matter. Their packaging can also use pails, jars, pots, tubes, pouches plus block bottom paper bags (like used for packets of flour), polythene bags of any size, woven sacks, triple walled paper sacks, polythene bags inside cardboard boxes, big bags with and without spouts. Of course, the filled packaging usually needs to be packed in some sort of shipping packaging like a corrugated cardboard box. We can do that. In fact we can get boxes made to suit any container and in special cases we can get a bottle made to our own design, so we can do the packing and the packaging!