Impendi’s Print and Packaging Center of Excellence enables enterprises across diverse verticals to go beyond their generalist staff and bring deep expertise to their print and packaging supply chains, ultimately finding effective ways to reduce the cost of printing and packaging materials by 20-40%.
Our engagements with client’s print supply chain and packaging materials ecosystem regularly result in improved lead-times, quality, and reduced inventory, while reimagining supplier relationships via clear designed for implementation agreements that generate impact long after we exit. We support client’s goals in ESG and CSR with a supplier ecosystem that has documented adherence to Social Responsibility Standards and capabilities to increase product and corporate sustainability.
Print and packaging supply chains span two huge, diverse, dynamic markets with myriad subsegments and applications
In actual fact, Print and Packaging isn’t one but two distinct Centers of Excellence, albeit with significant overlap. While most packaging tends to be printed, print isn’t limited to packaging. There are many product categories from marketing materials to credit cards that are printed outside of packaging.
Within Packaging alone, the three verticals—primary, secondary, tertiary—flow into subsegments like shelf-ready, frustration-free and ‘smart’ packaging, which is among the fastest growing spend categories. There are regulated subsegments that span diverse healthcare products from clinical supplies and medical devices to drugs and vaccines. There’s cold chain packaging, growing at double-digits, carrying temperature sensitive products for the food, cosmetics, chemical and pharmaceutical industries.
Printing is an even wider, more diverse pool of use cases spanning offset, flexographic, digital and gravure using, ink, inkjet, toner, dye on paper, plastic, corrugated, metal, glass, virtual any substrate, which can be pliable or rigid. There are myriad permutations of what ‘print’ means today, and all these are rapidly evolving.
As in Packaging, companies that benefit from our expertise in Printing span sectors such as Food, Consumer Packaged Goods, Healthcare and Pharm-BioPharma, where products include instructional and registration guides. And Printing clients also span sectors like Travel/Hospitality, Real Estate, Banking/Insurance and Telecoms, several of which are also highly regulated in what/when they can print.
Experience working across this vast, complicated nexus of print and packaging supply chains sets us apart
Why is the diversity, complexity and makeup of these two markets and nature of their overlap important? Because it is within this complicated assortment of supply chains where the competitive advantage of Impendi and its Print and Packaging Center of Excellence resides.
We bring the experience, price points, benchmarks, toolsets and know-how that comes from working every aspect of print and packaging supply chains across most all industry verticals and applications for 30+ years. We know raw materials costs and cost drivers by product types, where the market is on different subcategories of spend in any sector and can break down costs into components that drive should-cost analyses.
Our Center is led by executives who’ve walked in your shoes as procurement leaders at companies like Pratt Industries, Veritiv, PCA and RRD. We’ve worked for the manufacturing, distribution, and end-user sides of print and packaging across multiple industries.
Few clients can afford to have that type of specialized print and packaging materials expertise on staff. We ask hard questions and doggedly pursue answers many internal procurement teams might not take on in value capture initiatives. Print and packaging is a unique spend category where it’s not necessarily the size of the spend that indicates whether there are sizeable savings to go after. We have seen sub-million-dollar parts return hundreds of thousands in savings.
And unlike internal client procurement teams who now struggle just to get product in and out the door and resolve emergencies, we can come in and remain scope-locked on print and packaging and drive to results.
A unique set of executional capabilities brings novel insights about ways to reduce the cost of printing and packaging materials
Print and packaging spend isn’t hard to capture savings in. Most internal teams or consultants can run competitive processes to reduce costs. Compared to these alternatives, we’re not just ‘me too, minus 10%’.
- Clients with Cold-Chain requirements, need experts who truly understand their cost drivers. In addition to writing agreements that capture and control these drivers, our Supplier Ecosystem contains some of the best suppliers in this space. Suppliers with in-house ISTA labs who can accurately analyze their payload and lanes, and recommend solutions tailored to their exact needs.
- In today’s era of ongoing inflationary supply chain challenges, our experts have a fundamental understanding of the drivers behind these pressures and can advise clients on managing their costs using the true drivers and nothing else. Inflationary environments generally mean inflationary supplier margins. We teach your procurement teams to identify the true drivers and how to allow only the actual values to pass through.
- We bring agreements and cost templates, that allow our clients’ procurement teams to control costs and manage spend easily, using clearly defined language and rules. Our team can provide you with tools to apply our agreement escalator/de-escalator clauses quickly and simply. Your team will not need a math or law degree to implement and maintain your Impendi negotiated agreements.
