With sales of more than $300 million in 1998, American Safety Razor believes it's a cutting-edge company in the private label/personal care industry. ASR continues to expand its product line and operates in 92 foreign countries, with eight U.S. facilities. To keep up with its growing business, ASR needed a flexible packaging supplier that could provide quick turnaround times on multiple, short-run orders and manage production of packaging for more than 800 SKUs on more than 150 brands. To do this, the company chose Duralam Inc. (Appleton, WI) to convert flexible materials that it uses for razor packaging.
"Before we selected Duralam as our sole vendor, we had five or six different suppliers," says Jeff Coppola, vice president of logistics at ASR. "Our vendors were spread around, and we didn't develop a partnership." Coppola says having more than one vendor fostered an adversarial relationship with converters because ASR was always looking for the lowest price and sometimes had to sacrifice quality and turnaround time. But all of that was corrected when the decision was made to use Duralam exclusively.
"Duralam was able to sit down and say that X amount of hours were dedicated to ASR," he says. "That's allowed us to take a six-week lead time and turn some things around in less than two weeks." Because Duralam has blocks of time set aside for ASR orders, Duralam is prepared for the orders when they come in. This means ASR can send orders to Duralam right up until that time, and Duralam will dedicate that time to ASR orders.
Lead time is an important factor to the company. With private-label accounts, including Kmart, Target and Walgreens, that regularly change graphics, ASR needed a converter that could work closely with its outside graphics vendor to ensure the various films would be printed correctly and in a timely manner. Cage Graphic Arts (Philadelphia, PA) prepares the plates for ASR packaging. "Duralam works very closely with our graphics people," Coppola says. "They have cut lead times in half. For reorders, they're down to two weeks [from four to six weeks necessary for previous converters]." One of the ways Duralam is able to do this is by using a narrow-web flexo-printing press by Paper Converting Machine Co. (Greenbay, WI) with quick-changeover features.
