CONTRIBUTOR CONTENT
Theodoros Striftompolas is a supply chain and operations professional with over a decade of experience in the automotive industry. He has held various roles at Lotus Cars, Jaguar Land Rover and MAHLE Powertrain. His expertise ranges from logistics and packaging strategy to operational improvement and cross-functional transformation, with a focus on connecting operational decisions to wider business performance. He writes here in a personal capacity.
When a new product or operation is being prepared for launch, the focus is usually on getting the operation itself right. The machines are the best that money can buy or engineering can design, everything has been planned to the letter, budgets and cash flow are in order, suppliers have been chosen, contracts signed and tests completed.
In the days after launch
Following the successful launch, within days of the systems going live, the first call comes in. A customer, or perhaps a supplier, reports that the packaging is not working. They are struggling to store it or bring it into their operation, and the extra handling is adding labour, which they now expect you to pay for.
Before you have had the chance to understand what happened, a second call comes from the warehouse. A pallet has collapsed in an inbound lorry and the parts are now in quarantine. To protect the crew and the operation, the remaining pallets are being held until they can be checked and released.
So far, this is manageable. These things happen, and they are part of the job. Or are they?
Then a third call arrives. Production has stopped. Everything was in place and everything was planned, and a line stoppage is the one outcome everyone knows must not happen.
And yet the nightmare scenario has unfolded. For simplicity, let’s assume this is a batch of new customisation parts that appears to be scuffed, and the quality team is inspecting them one by one to decide which can still be used. These are painted, customer-visible parts, so there is little room for compromise. The rejected parts cannot simply be reworked and will need to be replaced. But that is not the only problem.
The supplier does not have enough replacement parts ready and, even if they did, much of the assigned returnable packaging is being held while the affected stock is inspected. That means the containers cannot be released back into the loop until the parts have been cleared. That leaves an unpleasant but obvious choice: absorb the cost of emergency one-way packaging rather than delay production any further.
One-way packaging was never intended to be part of the normal operation. It costs considerably more, wastes material and still requires additional checks until the underlying problem is resolved.
Does any of this sound familiar?
These situations are not unusual in automotive, nor are they unique to it. The scenario here is a simplified composite reflecting patterns that can arise across different operations. Everything appears ready to go and then, when something goes wrong, packaging quickly becomes highly visible, exposing the work that normally happens behind the scenes. Its importance then becomes very clear and the knock-on effect escalates pretty fast.
This could involve a single part, as in the scenario described here, or several separate incidents involving different parts, suppliers or orders. Either way, each issue still has to be dealt with and resolved accordingly.
Packaging is in place, but is that enough?
Occasions like these are often described as packaging failure. But is packaging really what failed?
The packaging existed. It had been sourced, approved and introduced into the operation, so on paper it had been covered. The bigger misunderstanding, perhaps, is the assumption that having packaging in place amounts to packaging readiness.
A container can exist and still be wrong for logistics operations, the supplier process, the storage environment, the return loop, the production line, the handling method or the part it is supposed to protect. It can meet an individual requirement and still fail when exposed to the full operation and to real handling and transport conditions.
Most of the time, packaging does its work unnoticed. Parts move, vehicles are loaded, warehouses operate and production continues, and few people stop to ask what enabled those movements because there is no reason to. And that is great! When packaging does not work, however, the disruption can be considerable. A problem that begins with a container can quickly become a quality issue, a warehouse issue, a transport issue, a supplier problem, a capacity issue, an inventory issue and eventually a production issue.
The questions to answer before launch
For most projects, packaging availability is likely to be part of the project and the launch approval readiness documentation. Availability, however, does not prove integration, operational suitability, efficiency or alignment with the surrounding system.
Was the packaging validated against the part, the transport route and the point of use? Was the supplier process understood? Were the handling and storage conditions considered? Was the returnable loop sized to support the planned volume? Were the people who would actually handle and use the packaging involved early enough?
These questions seem obvious once a problem has occurred, but they are far easier and cheaper to answer earlier in the process before a complication surfaces.
Starting earlier, identifying the connections and confirming potential drawbacks, or fail points, will make it easier to anticipate and deal with potential disruptions and eliminate them or at the very least contain them, before the launch happens.
My involvement in similar scenarios and in resolving the problems they created helped me identify some simple lessons and practical considerations. First of all, do not focus only on the container, but on the full journey and all the “touch” points across the supply chain. Mapping the end-to-end journey accurately leaves less room for surprises down the road. It also allows you to test and validate against the real working conditions. The trials should not be simply a tick box exercise, based on optimal scenarios, but should simulate what is expected when the operation is at full throttle and the pressure to deliver is at its maximum.
This then means getting the right people involved. That can mean talking to the operators on the production line, the logistics operatives and the supplier. They are the people who will manage and handle the packaging and the parts, making their input and past experience invaluable in preventing problems from appearing or reappearing.
Another important point for consideration is having the right control and reporting mechanisms in place to ensure that any change in the assumptions and conditions, triggers a review for the fitness of your packaging solution into the new operating reality.
Making packaging part of operational readiness
The automotive industry has become exceptionally good at designing sophisticated manufacturing systems, increasingly complex supply chains and highly controlled production environments. Yet, packaging can still be treated only as a functional requirement. That is a risky simplification for something so fundamental to the supply chain.
Packaging has rarely been seen in those terms, but it is arguably a fundamental building block of the entire operation. It accompanies and protects parts and products, inbound and outbound, at every step of their journey, and without it almost no physical movement through the system is possible.
You would not build a house without strong foundations, or build a car without the chassis or body structure around which the rest of the vehicle is assembled. But simply having those elements in place would not be enough either. They have to be designed for the appropriate interfaces and conditions they are expected to support.
Why, then, should the physical system that enables thousands of components to be protected, stored, handled and moved through the supply chain receive less preparation and scrutiny? Ensuring packaging suitability does not need to dominate the project plan, nor does every packaging decision need to become a major discussion point. It needs, however, to be integrated early enough and tested against the operational reality so that packaging readiness becomes an embedded part of the wider operational and launch readiness checks.
There is, of course, much more involved. Packaging development, supplier capability, return loops, ownership, standards, information, maintenance, lifecycle management and compliance all need to be understood and managed as well. But the guiding principle is much simpler.
If there is one point to keep in mind, it is not to mistake having packaging available for being operationally ready.
When the launch celebrations are over, would you rather be the person being patted on the back because everything ran as planned?
Or the one being patted on the back while somebody asks: “What went wrong this time… again?”
