It’s been said that you can’t make a baby with nine women in the room. The same can be said when it comes to purchasing packaging and processing machinery or entire packaging lines.
However, like anyone else, project managers and buyers have a timeline already in mind before they call Frain for a machine or packaging line project. And, as you can guess, rarely is the timeline that they have the worst case scenario, but rather the best case scenario based on smaller timelines all being met.
For example, we give customers a timeline based upon completed factory acceptance testing and payment received date. If either of these checkpoints is delayed by a day, then the equipment ship date gets pushed back by the same magnitude.
Timing assumptions become even trickier with purchases of complete packaging lines because you’re dealing with several different parties all coming together, each with their own intricacies. Achieving the best case scenario timeline for packaging machinery can be compared parlaying eight bets and expecting to win everyone one of them.
With packaging lines, you’re typically also at the mercy of the longest individual machine timeline in creating a critical path. If one piece of the entire machine takes six months to get, then you’re timeline is six months at the minimum before your team has the chance to integrate.
Furthermore, most companies do not have their “A Team” ready for machinery integration once it arrives. However, timelines are sometimes built with these unrealistic expectations and the project runs late. Adding more manpower to the project, established in software projects but probably true in many other instances, may also just create more waste and delay.
Interestingly enough, the phrase “you can’t make a baby with nine women in the room” did come to mind when I started at Frain and it’s unique value propositions:
- Machinery – 9,000 machines in stock, in our building(s)
- Manpower to fully calibrate and integrate the machinery
- Experience (35 years) and engineering staff you can trust
In the case of Mars, where we assembled a complete packaging line seven months sooner than their traditional supplier for a new Starburst packaging launch – we enabled Mars to capture millions in Brand Revenue that they would have otherwise not captured. In other words, if they didn’t go with Frain, they would’ve walked away from millions of dollars during their initial launch.
We’ve done the same for countless projects small to extra large. The larger and more frequent, the more Frain makes sense. When you factor several projects from a traditional launch vs. Frain, you begin to see that Frain can launch several projects for the price and time of one.
So, whether you need your project delivered in one month or 10 machines in one week, Frain can help.
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