In recent years, sustainability has established itself as one of the strongest trends in the packaging industry. Environmental compatibility and multi-purpose suitability will be decisive purchasing factors in the future, but taking the eco-friendly road no longer means that the customers will have to pay an extra price or compromise in quality. In fact, both these aspects quality and sustainability goes hand in hand when it comes to flexible packaging.
This gives a lot of challenges to the producers and suppliers of packaging solutions as they need to reinvent their current products to meet the new environmental requirements in terms of materials, and ad the same time try to ensure a multifunctional solution when possible. The effect is that more resources are to be added to reinvent already released products without adding more cost to the final products which put a stress on both human resources and IT systems.
Most producers have monolith solutions without integrating R&D and Laboratory Systems (LIMS) with the quality systems in the production does that mean to do the changes in multiple systems is the challenge big. Investing in new simple and integrated solutions is therefore imperative, but at the same time it increases the Total Cost of Quality. But without this solution, the Total Cost of Poor Quality would increase. As often the change mean working in new materials – new processes and even operating new equipment and as there is a learning curve on all items will that potential lead to a higher scrap rate unless the related preventive and detecting actions are taken in consideration. Also, the increasing demands for traceability add a stress factor on the employees and systems and of course need to be integrated. As many packaging companies have a history of using paper, Excel, standalone or even homemade systems is the challenge big and the need of standard solutions high.
As the quality of the packaging often is directly related to the quality of the product is the need for being able to document a high quality not only a requirement but also a competitive advantage.
As the companies often have very automated production processes do the systems, besides being integrated with the existing IT landscape & machines the systems also need to monitor the quality and ensure that preventive actions are taken whenever an error occurs. This is to be done both on machine – line – plant and company level to ensure that improvements are implemented on a global scale and ideally also integrated with supplier data.
The above can be a huge challenge and of course set a set of demands to the supplier of QMS systems as beside meeting the quality requirements of the QM department it also need to be provided with a cost-efficient license model and flexible deployment model allow for global settings and local adaptations, be future proof and provide a Gate-to-Gate solution. Due to the remote chance of adding additional cost to the finished product will the cost need to be justified by a good and solid ROI calculation supported by a trusted and experienced system provider.
With our software solution QDA, we have been supporting our customers for more than 30 years in the area of quality management both in the production and laboratory environments. We work closely with our customers to find the optimal solution for them, including compliance with prescribed standards. QDA SOLUTIONS have been working with some of the biggest suppliers of packaging materials and packaging machines for more than 15 years and gained a huge expertise in optimizing the processes and reduce cost.
Do you have specific questions about our solutions? Get in touch!
Ludmila Lebedev
Director QDA SOLUTIONS