Thinking outside the box

Pharmaceutical companies are looking to their packaging suppliers to help them take costs out of the supply chain. Ian Anderson, sales & marketing director of Field Boxmore, considers how the carton makers are responding

Faster, smarter, better - but cheaper and available wherever. This is what today's European pharmaceutical industry is demanding of its packaging suppliers.With year-on-year double-digit profit growth no longer guaranteed, pharmaceutical companies are looking for cost savings throughout their supply chain. In addition, the increasing need for differentiation, an ever more demanding regulatory environment and the inevitable globalisation of the marketplace are the forces driving the industry's relationship with its packaging suppliers.

new technologies

Practices such as vendor-managed inventory, ship to line, and 'kitting' - where one supplier takes over responsibility for the supply of all components for a particular product - previously the preserve of the automotive industry, are now commonplace in pharmaceutical packaging. Likewise, the use of electronic media to manage the interface between supplier and customer, including communication of order requirements and artwork, and the workflow itself is now standard practice. Throughout the industry order quantities are reducing and lead-times shortening, which in turn is forcing packaging suppliers to investigate new printing technologies such as digital, although this is by no means the only solution and has yet to make significant inroads in pharmaceutical printing.

As the pharmaceutical industry consolidates, so it looks for fewer and better suppliers, able to offer not only the full range of existing printed products - i.e. cartons, leaflets and labels - but also novel solutions such as booklets, leaflet-labels and leaflet-cartons. These packaging practices cater for the ever increasing demand for more information - all this as a standardised package across Europe backed up by common quality and validation systems and standards of service. As in so many other industries it seems that the days of the small purely national supplier may be numbered, although the critical nature of pharmaceutical packaging means that a close relationship between the individual supplier and user site remains as important as ever.

marketing medium

With more products moving to otc status and pharmaceutical companies increasingly appreciating the importance of packaging as a marketing medium, another discernible trend is towards greater variety and complexity of print. This in turn could mean a greater involvement of packaging suppliers in design and specification, as is already the case in several other sectors of the packaging industry.

Design capability will relate not only to print and image but also to functionality. This includes both techniques to prevent or detect counterfeiting and tampering - increasing concerns for the industry as new markets open up around the world - and improvements to packing line efficiency, an area which is likely to attract considerably more attention in the future, as cost pressures intensify.

major threat

Trying to predict long-term trends in any industry is difficult, but one thing seems likely: that the major threat to (and opportunity for) tomorrow's packaging suppliers will come as much from shifts in the supply chain as from traditional like-for-like competitors.

Historically, the role of the print packaging industry has been to convert a pre-set design, with only minor modifications, to a printed carton, label or leaflet supplied to the customer's packing line warehouse.

In future, the challenge may be to grasp the opportunity to provide the pharmaceutical company, now concentrating only on r&d and sales, with everything from initial pack design through to packed product supplied to the end market in one seamless computer-controlled process, most of which might just as easily take place on the customer's premises as in the supplier's stand-alone factory or - and herein lies the threat - be carried out by someone else in the supply chain such as the contract packer or healthcare services supplier.