About the client
Industry: Lighting
Product: LED shop lights
Company Size: Medium size
Location: United States
Challenges
- The artwork team on the client’s side changed designs too frequently, which left little time for the suppliers to review and suggest proposal;
- The manufacturing lead time was squeezed, which lead to 36.7% of rejection rate from Walmart and The Home Depot when the samples were submitted;
- The average process cycle time for the artwork was 3 weeks, which was so long that the on-time delivery schedule was affected;
- It took almost 30% of each of the 4 salespersons’ time to handle the artwork workload;
- The artwork to be re-designed and re-built for even the tiniest changes on the package such as the quantity change;
- All required information needed to be printed one at a time on the package. If the info printed was incorrect, the package would be scrapped and re-built until all the info was correct;
- The lead time for each portion was 20% to 25% longer compared with normal situation.
How we helped
- Suggested the client to work with Walmart and The Home Depot artwork team to set up regular communication schedule and mechanism;
- Guided the assembly factory to define a review procedure with our client’s US artwork team and document the alignment requirements;
- Made the assembly factory the owner to follow up and take the lead of requesting for the draft of artwork as scheduled, which could help shorten the working time;
- Defined a master schedule with the client for the artwork design, then shared with Walmart, The Home Depot and the assembly factory. So all parties were clear about the timeline and could manage the process at ease;
- Suggested the client to design the whole package by parts, and assemble the package first to isolate packaging issues;
- Suggested that the client design dedicated high quality labels with information such as product description printed, then paste them on the packages. This was much easier comparing to rebuild the whole package just for the change of label information;
- Suggested the client to reserve enough margin on the label for required information to be printed on later, which was easy to clean and re-print if the info was wrong.
Results
- The overall lead time for artwork verification process was shorten from 3 weeks to 2 weeks;
- Saved about $145,000 packaging cost in 2015;
- Improved the on-time delivery performance from 93.8% to 97.2% because of process optimization;
- Received recognition on performance improvement from Walmart and The Home Depot;
- Built better relationship with Walmart, The Home Depot and packaging suppliers.
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