Recently we listened to  a consumer products company’s director of manufacturing talking about how the packaging machinery people cannot speak about the consumables, but the consumables people do understand the machinery.

This triggered a wrapping issue story in our brain.

The first is about the customer who called last week because their wraps had become very bad. It turns out that the film manufacturer had discontinued the film that had worked so well for them and that the replacement film sold them was not working well. In fact, it was much too flexible and they could not get the needed crisp folds from it. They called us and we  asked them to see if their old film still worked. It did, which that told us it was a film issue.  So we contacted their film supplier who told us that their new film was the right replacement. Not satisfied, we kept asking if there were other choices.  Lots of persistent questions paid off and we found that there was a better replacement film than the one our customer had purchased. Their remaining issue is now getting the supplier to exchange the film they did buy for the one they should have been sold.

We test lots of film, so we know something about their performance characteristics. Sometimes our customers know what film they want. Sometimes they want to change vendors and ask our advice on films. Sometimes we just want to know about new films. So we keep testing films to know what works and where problems can arise.

While it is true that the film sellers visit our common customers more often than we do, they are selling something every month or quarter. We are selling a new machine to a given customer every 3 to 60 years. But our customers need to know what films work on their machines and we need to  know that our machines remain flexible enough to  work on a variety of films. So we have to compensate with continuous testing of materials. Last week it was a new PLA based film….

Give us a call to find out about films for wrapping. If we don’t know it, we will try it.