Contract Manufacturing, Packaging and OEM

Contract Manufacturing, Packaging and OEM Challenges across the Supply Network

Consumer product brand owners, pharmaceutical / biopharma companies, final assembly OEMs and other finished product companies face a business environment with globalized demand, customized product desires, margin pressures, new regulatory regimes and lean inventory programs all of which conspire to drive up the complexity of planning for and executing on manufacturing programs. As a result, contract manufacturers and packagers of various types are being enlisted to provide flexible capacity, production agility, technical and operational expertise, market access and a variety of other operational benefits.

The challenge for CMOs, CPOs and component OEMs is how to differentiate yourself from a host of competitors while still maintaining profit margins. Every new project you win is also a test case on your current performance. Expected service levels keep rising. Delivery schedules get tighter and pressures to reduce delivered cost always increase. Your customers want the agility to respond to changes in demand or product configuration regardless of current production plans. Your response to these challenges can determine why you and not some other contract manufacturing firm should get the business.

Then there are the technical challenges. Customers want high levels of project collaboration and process coordination, yet each one of your customers and suppliers has a different enterprise system, data format and preferred integration scheme. Using a customer’s ERP Portal sounds like an option to access the information you need. But what happens when you have 200 customers? Do you access 200 Portals?

Solve this puzzle and you can create a competitive advantage that secures existing business, opens doors to new business and maintains the profit margins on contracted business that your firm needs to survive and thrive.

How TraceLink can help Contract Manufacturing, Packaging and OEM companies

• Reduce operational costs.  Increased material costs, growing product line / SKU complexity, shortened production windows and intense competition threaten tight contract manufacturing margins. You want all the new business you can handle but you don’t want to go out of business serving it. In response, you need to reduce operating overhead, on-hand and safety stock inventory levels, and cash-to-cash cycle times and improving utilization of capital and human resources.
  • TraceLink’s Predictable Supply Suite can help by reducing process delays, eliminating manual work steps and improving accuracy at all points in the production lifecycle. Improve production room, equipment and human resource utilization through better insight into customer needs and expected material deliveries. Reduce cycle time by reducing initial order negotiation time, shrinking quality review periods, reducing supply delivery lead times and eliminating lags in production signoff.  Automate data collection and reporting processes.  
• Gain a competitive advantage with differentiated service. Brand owners are looking for their outsourced contract manufacturing partners to feel like an extension of their internal manufacturing groups. In effect, acting like an agile virtual manufacturing site that still provides the same levels of quality, visibility and control that internal operational sites do. In response, you need to differentiate yourselves through best-in-class customer service and ease-of-doing-business without massive infrastructure investment.
  • TraceLink’s Predictable Supply Suite can help by getting you connected to your customers in real-time, improving your insight into customer needs and enhancing the knowledge you need to provide better quality, timeliness and performance than your competitor. Provide predictable contract production from purchase orders, customer forecasts and other production triggers. Enable faster and more agile product manufacturing. Provide greater visibility into your current production status. Offer enhanced reporting and metrics to feed into customer production planning processes.
• Simplify business connectivity to customers. Coordinating orders and production schedules across your diverse customer base is tough and efficient interoperability is virtually impossible when relying on phone, FAX, email and other out-of-band communications. Integrating to all of your customer enterprise systems is cost prohibitive. You also cannot waste time hopping from one enterprise Portal to another Portal as you try to serve your customers on a daily basis.
  • TraceLink’s Predictable Supply Suite can help by providing a flexible contract manufacturing collaboration environment that gets your production and business development teams sharing information and insight with Tier-1 and long-tail customers. Quickly create secure business Clouds that connects the people, business processes and information that you need on a per-customer, per-product or per-project basis. Without massive overhead and technical complexity, get team members sharing production status, quality documents, inventory information, notes, discussions and other contextual information in whatever form they need when they need it. 
• Reduce contract production and business risk. Missed production schedules, missed quality levels and missed customer orders are often caused by lack of communication, coordination and actionable data, not bad intent. Customer project teams and contract manufacturing production teams often have different views of reality because they are working off of different information. Delays pile up as teams wait for reviews and signoffs.
  • TraceLink’s Predictable Supply Suite can help by improving your visibility to and insight on production plan changes which impact your planned and current production schedules. Improve the initial purchase order negotiation to speed agreement and ensure common expectations are created on both sides. Gain awareness of production forecast, raw material and component delivery schedule deviations then quickly analyze production schedule ramifications and preferred responses. Reduce unanticipated production delays by identifying decisions and quality review signoffs awaiting action. Enhance end-to-end visibility across the production order lifecycle and drill down into any specific production phase.

Next steps

• Try It Yourself.  In minutes, launch a no obligation FREE TRIAL of our Predictable Supply Suite. Create your own Process Link collaborative team workspace, invite and quickly connect to virtual team members, then experience a new world of production visibility and tracking across your contract manufacturing operations!
• Demo Production Tracking.  Request a guided PERSONAL DEMO of our Production Tracking and ProcessLink solutions. On your schedule, one of our team members will take you through our solution.

Explore More

• Discover Production Tracking.  Find out how the TraceLink Production Tracking solution can give you visibility and control throughout the entire contract manufacturing lifecycle. Go Production Tracking
• Experience ProcessLink.  Review TraceLink's innovative approach to connecting you and your internal contract manufacturing teams to your partners both fast and flexibly. Go ProcessLink