Wilpak Will Pack It

By Eric Van Osten

Companies in a Bind Find Complex Tasks Made Simple at Wilpak Inc.

Wilpak cut shipping costs by developing a new quarter-pallet display for Big Time Products' Firm Grip gloves.

Imagine your company is about to promote its household product by creating half-pallet retail displays. The cartons for the original packaging are too large, so you make them smaller. These new cartons don't fill the displays the same way, so you stuff the void at the back of the trays with space fillers. Then you realize that this redistribution of weight toward the front of the displays causes them to collapse. You have only a short amount of time to get these problems fixed and get the displays out the door. What will you do?

You could call contract packager Wilpak—and that's exactly what this real-life customer did. Wilpak inserted additional filler layers between the trays on the pallets and completed 106 displays in less than a day for direct shipment to the client's retail customer. It also sent one to the client's tech center for advanced redesign for a pressing of the holiday shipment. In the end, the retail customer received its product on time, as scheduled.

As a contract packager headquartered in Atlanta, Wilpak's business is generated when an outside company wants to outsource some parts of its packaging process, whether it is for the introduction of a new product, a sudden surge in demand for a product, or sensitive, time-consuming runs of a product. But what makes Wilpak unique is what it calls its RDV®—Resource Distraction Value. RDV is the real dollar value of company resources and how they negatively impact the bottom line when distracted from their core dollar.

For example, some resource distractions a company may face when creating and producing packages are complex material planning, purchasing, quality assurance, floor space, transportation, manufacturing processes, and information technology networks. A company that deals with all of these interruptions in-house ends up risking having its resources distracted, increased operational costs, and loss of focus on its core competency. A company that outsources the job to Wilpak, though, avoids all of this because Wilpak maintains focus on core competency, maximizes shareholder values, and grows market share.

Wilpak manages the event for its customers, providing a complete turnkey solution. It is able to do this by using an in-house IT system suite called Vision. This software provides exposure to push-button reporting, guaranteeing maximum operating efficiencies that result in cost savings.

Wilpak's mission is to provide "simply perfect" services to its customers, which means delivering exceptional service quality with the greatest speed, efficiency, and productivity achievable.

"We emphasize the words 'simply perfect' because the word 'simple' really brings some benefit to the customer," says Eric Wilhelm, CEO of Wilpak. "If you can make the customer believe that to get a difficult job accomplished is truly simple, then you have done something magical for them. The truth is, it's not so simple—take a tour of our facilities and you'll see that it's not—but we make the job simple for our clients. We do that across the board. The clients don't sweat it; they just know it will get done. They hang up the phone with us and move onto something else because to them, the job has been completed."

"What Wilpak does best is not miss ship dates," says Tom Taylor, Wilpak general manager. "We have never missed a retail ship date in the history of the company. We have never sent out a defective product."

Wilpak's quality of work is created by leveraging its experience to show its clientele a better way of designing and assembling the products. Wilhelm comments, "We're always looking at it from a 'How can we improve their product?' point of view. We have experience, as far as the assembly process is concerned, to know what works and what doesn't work. By utilizing that experience, I think we can effectively reduce the overall cost by making the product simpler to assemble and, hopefully, more pleasing to the retail eye."

Their service efforts were recognized by the Institute of Packaging Professionals at Pack Expo this September, winning an Ameristar Award for developing an innovative Machine Formed Warehouse Club Tray and Pallet System. This system achieved many benefits and represented Wilpak's ongoing internal initiatives to assist clients in reducing the costs from all areas of the supply chain.

One thing that makes Wilpak's results so impressive is their ability to call on committed partners. "Even though we have a history of producing hundreds of millions of packages under our business license here, we know there are people who specialize in designing a standard display, a corrugated quarter pallet, a clamshell display pallet, and so on," Wilhelm explains. "For whatever expertise is needed, we find the people who are great at it and outsource that piece to them, letting us provide a much better service to our customer. We can admit that there are others better than us at designing packages, but Wilpak is better than anybody at executing packaging services because we outsource this piece, allowing our customers to have a much broader choice when it comes to pre-design or initial design of a package." Some of the package design partners Wilpak uses regularly are Rich Nay of Wilheit Packaging LLC, Gary Templeton of FCP Alliance, and Richard Heyderman of Multi Dimensional Resources.

Labor savings aside, simple product design can also mean more efficient design, making the package lighter in weight, resulting in savings in transportation costs. Taylor illustrates this with a case in which the customer came to Wilpak with a quarter-pallet to quote: "Quarter-pallets are really tough to assemble. You have banding, shroud, trays, warehousing costs, etc. The costs of purchase displays are almost always less. We looked at this quarter-pallet display and decided to create a point-of-purchase display instead; one that was UPS-able, because quarter-pallet displays just don't ship well via UPS. We reduced the size of each individual pack by just a minimum amount, allowing us to insert one tray. It saved the company $35 for every display in UPS costs alone, saving them over a half-million dollars in the first year. Assembly costs were also less expensive."

Another way Wilpak reduces transportation costs for its customers is by direct shipping. Sending the packages directly to the retail stores instead of going through a distribution network is a major money-saver.

Big Time Products called on Wilpak to help them out with a quarter-pallet display of Firm Grip gloves for use in Home Depot. Mike Burkhalter, v.p. of operations at Big Time Products, comments, "We developed this package with Wilpak and they pulled it off without a hitch. Everything went great. We were trying to get it on the market and wanted to save on shipping costs. Wilpak saved us a tremendous amount of money and we've worked on several products with Wilpak since then."

Wilpak has come a long way since its beginning in Cleveland, OH, in 1950, when the Wilhelm family founded Amwear Contract Services, which evolved into Wilpak. The company has grown to capacities of 2,500 pallets per day of production and 100 truckloads shipping on any average day. There is a satellite location in Chicago now, as well as a contract manufacturing plant near the company's corporate headquarters in Atlanta, GA. The company operates 20 production lines consisting of display building, shrink-wrapping, sleeving, bundling, labeling, cartoning, blister packaging, fluid injection, knitting, and more. Some of its previous clients include Wrigley, Dial, Coca-Cola, and Kraft.

Wilpak won an IoPP Ameristar Award for this innovative pallet club store display that achieved improved shopability, improved appearance, lower cost, and shorter time to market.

Wilpak plans to expand services up and down the supply chain as well, by offering supply chain consulting, including RDV analysis. Wilpak sees the supply chain divided into six segments: 1) package design; 2) procurement/sourcing; 3) material planning; 4) process/packaging; 5) storing or warehousing; 6) shipping. Wilpak is usually asked to lend a hand in segment #4 of the process—the processing and packaging. "We are now getting to the point where we are working both upstream and downstream from #4," Wilhelm says. "For example, we're getting companies to bring us in on the package design segment so we can point out areas of potential costs savings that probably won't actually show up until segments four, five, or six in the chain. If one entity, Wilpak, is held accountable for all of the aspects in the chain, we can rack up substantial savings for our clients." Taylor says, "We want to vertically sell inside our current customer base and increase our business with them. After experiencing our services once, our customers will come back asking for more opportunities to do other creative things. We're also just looking for other good business partners that fit into the mold of what we're looking for in a partner. We want people who share our vision."

By being able to accomplish difficult tasks with such speed and quality, Wilpak, the contract packager with a perfect record, only continues to grow and improve over time. "We will not fail," claimed Taylor. "We have a whatever-it-takes attitude and that's what makes us so successful."

"The customer doesn't lose sleep when their product is in our hands," says Wilhelm. "By nature, the jobs we get are the most difficult ones for the customer to get to the market. By history, they are the easiest ones to manage because the customer need only pick up the phone, tell us what they want, and it magically appears, every time, without fail, without difficulty, and without delay. Our packages come without excuses."