Is hot melt adhesive the disenfranchised stepchild of your manufacturing operation? If not, good. But if you’ve had ongoing issues with solid adhesive control, expense, functionality, sanitation and related, it might be worth your while to put...

One of the best strategies to improve packaging operations is to solicit ideas from the people who are on the plant floor, actually dealing with the machines and packaging materials. And contests are a great way to incentivize employees to come...

“What we have here is a failure to communicate.” That famous quote from the movie “Cool Hand Luke” applies all too often to Marketing and Manufacturing departments. Don’t get me wrong, Marketing has to be king. If they can’t sell it, there’s no...

The GS1 General Specification requires the use of FNC1 but the transmitted data are the same if GS (Group Separator) is encoded instead. Does it really matter...

With increasing global competition, packaging manufacturers want to produce the highest quality products at the lowest possible cost, using supplies sourced from around the globe. But in doing so, these organizations spend enormous amounts of time...

When it comes to big dollars, product damage claims have the potential to rise to the top of a lot of internal reports and executive dashboards—especially if you’re shipping via complex and/or multi-touch methods.While everyone wants to ship their...

Packaging teams are most successful when they take advantage of the strengths of their members. Sometimes this means understanding and adopting different thought processes, which is especially powerful when colleagues share their prized ideologies...

EastPack 2014 enjoyed a successful run this week at the Javits Convention Center in New York City. It closes today at 3:00 p.m. eastern time...

Anything Wal-Mart can do to bring jobs home to American workers is included in the company’s U.S. sourcing initiative; and this includes retail packaging, according to Cindi Marsiglio, vp of U.S. manufacturing at Wal-Mart.By Chandler Slavin...

John was on the phone and sounded sad. "You know what a soda can looks like when you crush it in your hand? I have a 3,000 gallon tank like that.""That's some grip," I told him. "I need to come see the tank and who did it.""I did it," John told me...