2008: Taking Care of the Pennies (Part 5)
MANUFACTURE COLLABORATION – SQUEEZE TUBE with SCREW CAP
Executive on Demand Position:
Chief Operating Officer, Vice President Procurement, Vice President Research and Development, Vice President Logistics
Project Outline:
Deliver as a complete unit to a grease filler for a squeeze tube with a re-useable cap
Project Outcome:
Squeeze tubes can be supplied to the manufacturing sector with or without a cap. When used in the hardware supply market the squeeze tube is packaged with sealing products traditionally used once for sealing sinks and tubs in bathrooms and windows and doors without caps. In the automotive industry the squeeze tube is a package for a variety of grease products and traditionally is includes a cap to reseal the tube as it takes several applications to empty the tube. The client required the cap and to optimize the shipping of the finished product a cap needed to be installed by the tube maker. To deliver the ideal result, it required that a cap manufacturer be located locally to provide the proper specified cap, and to make the product on an as needed basis to coincide with the orders for tube. A production and packing relationship was developed between the two manufacturers where the cap maker was informed by the tube maker of the scheduled date to produce the tube order and with this information in hand the cap manufacturer delivered the caps to the tube maker the day before the tubes were schedule to be made. This enabled the tube maker to thread to caps on before packing the tubes into the master cartons.
The benefits to the tube customer is that they only were required to generate one purchase order to receive a final product as specified. The master carton quantities was the same whether the tube were packed with or without a cap. This combination strategy enabled the client to benefit as follows:
- Ship the caps for free as tube master cartons contained same quantity of tube whether or not a cap was installed
- Save inventory space in the local warehouse because only one stock keeping unit (SKU) was being stored
- Productivity in the warehouse as the retrieval of the tubes was now only a one step action instead of the traditional two (1 SKU vs 2 SKUs)