Chances are, if you’re a packaging engineer, management has asked you to provide statistics on what packaging the company uses, what it is made of or even how to reduce the overall costs of the company’s packaging. To get the answers, you pour through excel files of specifications, review PDF documents for hidden data and spend hours making management-friendly charts. Through all this work, you realize that to really take control of your packaging, you’ll want to analyze all the big data found within your company’s plethora of packaging specifications.

If your company has multiple manufacturing locations across town or across the world, you can benefit by identifying which packaging options can be found at which location. This makes it easier to identify waste or optimize packaging options at each location. With all of your packaging specifications loaded into one system, location analytics should be a snap.

When you are working with large packaging projects with fast moving goods, there are multiple people involved with the packaging – designers, engineers, brand managers, and QA. Each one of them has a given role and approval. Keeping track of who has approved which specs and how many outstanding approvals are still needed is critical to keeping your projects on track and getting the product to market with the right packaging. Consider creating a report showing the status of approved specs.

With today’s focus on the environment, you will want to be proactive on reporting the recycled content of all your packaging within your sustainability reporting. Create quick and easy reports for your corporate communications team to easily spread your good work with your customers and stakeholders.

Knowing which type of packaging your company uses might not seem so interesting, but it is the starting point for understanding where optimizations and cost reductions can be made. Start with a simple chart outlining the number of specifications within each packaging type. You might be surprised by the data you get back.

SKU proliferation is rampant today with so many consumer products on the market. There are 200m packaging SKUs in the world and 60m in the United States alone, with 10,000 new SKUs added everyday. Keep track of your new SKUs by tracking how many new specifications are created each quarter.

Creating these types of analytical charts is easy if you have all your packaging specifications organized in a centralized system. Whether they are in excel or an intelligent specification management system like Specright, you’ll find that once you start performing analytics you will gain surprising insight into your packaging.

If you don’t have a system to manage your specifications, book a demo of the Specright platform today and find out how you can take control of your packaging specifications.