Photo by Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition on Unsplash

From Paw Patrol to scented candles to animatronic Star Wars, it’s going to be a frantic Christmas search for parents, with some disappointments in store for their little darlings. The Suez Canal snafu, when the EverGiven blocked the world’s busiest shipping lanes, was not just a bad omen for world trade, it was the first sign that 2021 was going to test supply chains to their limits.

"Global supply chains depend on a very complex network of linkages, they depend on everything happening at the right time.
When the pandemic hit, everything came to a shuddering halt."

Amanda Ratcliffe, lecturer in retail marketing at Technological University Dublin

The watchword is Resilience

The most used word in the industry became resilience. Without it, there would be no animatronic Star Wars, no chipsets for the automotive industry, no Internet routers, and so on.

Add a biblical list of environmental challenges - yes, including flying locusts - as well as an unexpectedly fast bounceback in consumer spending for stay-at-home products, and you have a nasty goulash of supply chain problems. Of course the packaging industry itself is deeply affected by shortages. In a Bloomberg interview, the CEO of packaging giant Amcor said: “Everybody is short, the industry is out of capacity, it is sold out”

Collapsing the chain and taking control

The frustration is real: in a recent survey 72% of respondents reported difficulties in end-to-end monitoring of their supply chain.

What to do? As business people, we know all about resilience. And sitting on our hands won’t make anything better. At CoLab, we are fielding calls from existing and new customers who are dealing with their supply chain predicament by shortening the chain.

They don’t want to rely any more on packaging from the other side of the world, but on a supplier in their own time zone with a facility they can even visit if they want to.

Sourcing packaging locally, apart from the crucial benefit of shortening a dodgy supply chain, has other significant benefits, which add up to giving our customers much greater control and certainty.

Quality control: mistakes are costly, and hard to identify, let alone manage, with distance and language barriers. A vendor in the same time zone gives you superior control and input when it is needed most.
Market responsiveness: as the fast fashion industry has discovered, putting in orders months in advance risks losing a trend and being stuck with marked down merchandise. Working with a local digital printing partner like CoLab gives the flexibility to respond quickly to market demand, adding and swapping SKUs to reflect interest.
Personalisation: the flexibility of digital printing allows you to highly personalise packaging to make it most attractive on the shelves or in the mail. Ideas include numbering every package to offer a prize, adding a unique URL for special inside information, and so on.

Supply chain problems are not going away, and companies are learning to deal with them, either by suspending the fragility of just-in-time manufacturing or shortening the chain to improve, yes, resilience. At a time when, according to a French furniture manufacturer, “even a screw or small component from Asia can take three months,” businesses have to reimagine their suppliers, and create relationships closer to their markets.

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