Cartrom Embalagens - Sistemas híbridos de embalagens, econômicos e funcionais

What aspects do we need to consider in the packaging innovation journey?

We have lived in different ecosystems from different segments and contexts, listening to their pain points and developing technical solutions that help to successfully overcome the challenges of each company.

Each experience offers important lessons learned, and this allows us to catalyze best practices and generate exchanges between all these environments regarding packaging and its best application.

I cite some examples to contextualize what I said just now:

The automotive sector is recognized as an avant-garde segment in the industry, always stimulating increased productivity, efficiency and waste reductions throughout the value chain that boost its competitiveness. It is a very common requirement in this industry to manage inventories at the supplier and split deliveries into increasingly greater frequencies through highly adjusted time windows.

Good practices developed over years of experience allow us to model intelligent logistics scopes for companies in other segments that are developing a lean logistics culture.

Likewise, the retail segment constantly seeks to improve its flows, information, and processes to provide the best possible experience to the consumer, with careful observation of changes in behavior and trends generated from these new realities.

By being constantly stimulated by innovations that are disruptive from the consumer's perspective, we learn valuable lessons that help us to ask better questions about the experience that a Telecom company, for example, wants to provide to service provider users who will use its product. in the field, which will feed the development lines adopted for a new packaging.

Some premises have been shared by several of these segments, and have reached unanimity when starting a new project: innovation and sustainability. Innovation is not invention. And when we talk about packaging, it is necessary to understand that we do not need to “invent the wheel”, as there are many solutions and technical platforms available for application.

In this sense, our role is to find the combination of technical and material resources that best meets the need for protection in an intelligent way. I cite a new example: our SEC Line, designed as a hybrid protection solution that combines several types of material and guarantees excellent mechanical performance, especially for the metal-mechanical export segment, has gained publicity due to our more active participation in the Autodata, one of the references in content generation for the automotive sector.

It's great to be recognized as an innovative proposal, but we try to reinforce that the SEC Line has been developed by Cartrom for at least 20 years, and is consolidated and validated as a packaging standard for many of our customers. The other increasingly frequent premise is that solutions need to be sustainable. It is an inevitable evolution, as the rational use of resources “from cradle to grave” needs to be understood and applied so that we have a conscious and long-lasting consumption chain.

Once again, we have an agenda that is extremely aligned with our base product, corrugated cardboard, an artifact of an innovative and technological chain. The “cradle” of our industry are trees, cultivated through sustainable forest management and maintenance of forest areas intended for the conservation and maintenance of biodiversity. Before reaching the “grave”, paper encounters an established recycling industry and a consolidated value chain.

Brazil is one of the largest paper recyclers in the world, with a 66.9% material recovery rate, according to the Brazilian Tree Industry (IBÁ). This percentage represents approximately 50 million tons already sent for recycling.

There is still dissonance about how our industry can quantify carbon capture throughout the production chain, and the metrics for calculating carbon footprints have not yet been scaled for access by all companies. But it is only a matter of time before we have greater quantitative visibility of the contribution of sustainable packaging to the decarbonization so sought after by the industry that intends to remain competitive from now on. Redefining the way we view packaging is certainly a disruptive and rewarding experience.

Especially for this reason, we have chosen some success factors that can make a decisive contribution to the success of the innovation journey:

Functionality | Efficiency: As I heard once, there is no innovation in developing “NASA packaging” if it does not prove to be functional for the packaging operation. From this perspective, it is important to recognize that simple can be best in many circumstances.

Now, it is possible to move forward a few steps when a solution favors the use of fewer materials, a significant reduction in weight, or greater versatility to protect the most varied products in the portfolio. The measurement of costs and reduction of the environmental footprint must go beyond the “From-To” and also include gains in transportation and disposal of post-consumer packaging.

Collaboration | Threats: A quote attributed to Albert Einstein says that “creativity is intelligence having fun”. For a technical initiative to reach its maximum potential, it is very important to have a flexible mental model that is open to collaboration.

Diverse thinking can suggest unthought-of possibilities, and when feasible, fantastic; shared experiences, whether successful or frustrated, will point in risky directions that can be avoided; inviting other interested parties (the expatriate employee at the client, suppliers, logistics operators and the occupational safety engineer) is also a highly recommended line for exercising open and collaborative innovation.

Cultural Change: It must be understood that initiatives of this magnitude affect the company's culture, and provoke all phases of a change process, therefore they need to be recognized and managed. It is important to have alignment between sponsors, decision-makers and the operation, as aspects and dynamics consolidated for years (often) will be revisited, practices will be given new meanings.

They change the packaging dynamics, the way of moving, the way of boarding, as the cardboard “indicates mistreatment”; Therefore, long-term benefits need to be validated so that the future horizon is shared and welcomed by everyone involved.

Finally, more than a technical conversation, the reflection proposed here is about which developments will gain priority on the agenda of companies that want to remain competitive and current.

And see what a perfect and challenging combination: packaging often occupies an insignificant position in the operational cost structure, and how much is the gain in perceived value when designing functional, innovative and sustainable packaging?

Have you ever stopped to think about it? This is a good time for that!