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Vendor partnerships on the rise

New research from PMMI shows why more packagers are forging special relationships or partnerships with materials and machinery vendors.

Chart 2
Chart 2

More than ever, packagers are linking up with machinery and material suppliers to create special relationships that go beyond the traditional buy/sell paradigm. So packagers say in the latest packaging productivity survey conducted by the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute (Arlington, VA).

In a survey conducted late last year, 74% of respondents reported establishing special relationships or partnerships with material or container suppliers (Chart 1). That's substantially higher than the 58% reported a year earlier. Almost half of respondents reported establishing partnerships with machinery manufacturers. (Direct comparisons with the previous year's survey-which registered 3.7% for machinery builder partnerships-can't be made because the question and choices were worded differently.)

More evidence of partnerships? In the previous year's survey, almost 40% of respondents said they established no partnerships. In the most recent survey, that number was down to 11%.

Participation in partnerships were roughly similar across most industries, except for the beverage industry. There, 94% of respondents established special relationships with materials/ container suppliers, and 68% with equipment suppliers, the highest percentages for any industry identified in the survey.

As one might expect, larger companies were more likely to establish partnerships with suppliers than smaller companies, with 21% of respondents from the smallest companies (fewer than 100 employees) reporting no partnerships compared to only 7% of the very largest companies (over 2ꯠ employees).

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