Relationships are important in life. But for them to be successful, both parties need to put in the time and investment to make it work.
Those same principles hold true in the professional relationships you forge with suppliers. While some may tend to view the relationship with you and your business as more transactional, it’s easy to spot those suppliers who have your best interests at heart. Those are relationships that will help you succeed.
At the end of the day, anyone can sell you a case packer. But, for that piece of equipment to be successful over the long term depends largely on the relationship your supplier has built with you.
Of course, many packaging OEMs say they’re with you for the long haul, but that can be difficult to validate. Edson believes actions and results speak much louder than words.
We’ve been manufacturing case and tray packing machinery for the converted paper and diaper industry since the 1960s. Today, our packaging technologies are operating in close to 90% of the North American tissue mills, and every major converted paper expansion in the past five years within North America has utilized Edson for their end-of-line case packing. Why is that? Simply put, it’s because of the relationships and trust we have with our customers.
For example, some of our early model 3600 large case and tray packing machinery built in the 1970s are still operating with customers. As their business expands, we work closely with them to advise on new strategies to keep pace, which is why we perform retrofit upgrades to increase packing peed from 18 to 26 cases per minute. If we were solely interested in selling equipment, we’d steer them toward new machinery. But that’s not how we operate. A true partner looks out for their customers’ best interests by evaluating their goals and objectives, and recommending the right solution – whatever that solution is.
This is why relationships matter. Our customers know they can count on us to evaluate not only their immediate need, but develop a strategy to help get them where they want to be years down the road. We have the technology and nearly 60 years of industry expertise to rely on.
It wasn’t that long ago that 24” was the dominate case size for our customers – and our equipment excelled in these types of popular applications. But as retail buying patterns began to shift along with the rise of e-commerce sales and other factors, we recognized the looming need for smaller cases. In response, we designed our machinery with added flexibility to handle increased SKUs with smaller cases sizes. We were able to meet the needs of our customers both big and small through industry insight and the close relationships we’ve formed through the years.
Anyone can sell you a case packer, but for us, relationships are more important. We think our customers would tend to agree.
Josh Goulet is an Account Manager at Edson (https://www.edson.com/). He can be reached at Josh.Goulet@promachbuilt.com
Leave a Reply