Fundmentals of Reusable Packaging Workshop at PACK EXPO

Tues­day, Novem­ber 2, 2010
PACK EXPO Chicago, IL

On Tues­day after­noon at PACKEXPO, the RPA pre­sented its Fun­da­men­tals of Reusable Pack­ag­ing Work­shop to a group of about 70 end users and mem­bers. RPA pre­sen­ters Jon Kalin of Rehrig Pacific, Bob Klimko of ORBIS Cor­po­ra­tion, Lane Pence of CHEP USA, Drew Mer­rill and Keith Schall of CAPS, and Lyle Schmitt of John Deere Com­pany out­lined for atten­dees the first of four phases – Under­stand­ing — of imple­ment­ing a reusable pack­ag­ing strat­egy in a sup­ply chain. The remain­ing three phases are Accep­tance, Imple­men­ta­tion and Refinement.

Jon Kalin, RPA Chair­man of the Board, served as mod­er­a­tor for this infor­ma­tion packed ses­sion. The work­shop is an out­growth of a four-part cur­ricu­lum being devel­oped by the RPA to help end users learn how to iden­tify oppor­tu­ni­ties and then imple­ment reusable pack­ag­ing solu­tions to improve their sup­ply chain oper­a­tions. Kalin opened the ses­sion with an intro­duc­tion to reusable pack­ag­ing, and defined some of the ter­mi­nol­ogy and ini­tial steps a com­pany must go through to suc­cess­fully adopt a reusable solution.

Bob Klimko and Lane Pence dis­cussed the role of eco­nomic mod­el­ing and the key mea­sure­ments or met­rics nec­es­sary for build­ing a pro­gram. Both pre­sen­ters stressed the need for atten­dees to “think like a CFO” and build solid and data-driven mod­els in order to demon­strate the ROI of reusable pack­ag­ing. They also encour­aged atten­dees to take a holis­tic look at their sup­ply chains to deter­mine sav­ings and costs. For exam­ple, trans­port­ing empty reusable con­tain­ers back to a dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ter might increase trans­porta­tion costs, but decrease more costs in other areas. The most effec­tive reusable pack­ag­ing solu­tions will pos­i­tively impact all three finan­cial cat­e­gories of rev­enue enhance­ment, cap­i­tal uti­liza­tion, and oper­at­ing expenses. The pre­sen­ters directed atten­dees to the RPA Reusables Cost Com­par­i­son Tool.

Drew Mer­rill, Keith Schall and Lyle Schmitt dis­cussed finan­cial options for reusable pack­ag­ing sys­tems, and man­age­ment sys­tems used to track and man­age a reusable asset pro­gram. Finance options include own­ing or rent­ing reusable assets and pool­ing ser­vices. The pre­sen­ters gave detailed sce­nar­ios to help atten­dees deter­mine which model best suits their sup­ply chains. They also detailed dif­fer­ent aggre­gate and indi­vid­ual track­ing meth­ods and tech­nolo­gies avail­able to track reusable con­tain­ers and their con­tents through­out the sup­ply chain. Item level track­ing includes bar code scan­ning, pas­sive RFID tags, active RFID tags and iGPS. Lyle Schmitt then gave an overview of John Deere’s com­plex and world­wide inte­grated logis­tics system.

Atten­dees told the RPA that the work­shop was very infor­ma­tive and well worth their time. Watch the RPA web­site for infor­ma­tion on the avail­abil­ity of the four-part cur­ricu­lum as it is devel­oped.
 

To view the slides from the pre­sen­ta­tion click here

Pic­tures from Workshop