One supplier that offers this service is San Jose, CA-based Portola Packaging (www.portpack.com).
Jim McGann, purchasing agent at Bell Dairy in Lubbock, TX, was one of Portola’s first customers to use the site. McGann says he has ordered caps online three times for Bell Dairy’s gallon and half-gallon milk jugs, and plans to continue using it. “Now I don’t have to mess with a fax machine, and don’t have to worry about [the fax machine’s] busy signal,” McGann says. “I know that once I’ve hit the submit button, [the order] has gone directly to the plant.” McGann adds that ordering caps on Portola’s Web site takes half the time of faxing in his order.
Available to Portola’s customers since early December, the site is still in the early stages of its rollout. “We’re doing it in a very controlled manner to make sure that the pricing and the customers’ products are correct,” says Joe Buchanan, vice president of Portola. “We don’t want anyone having bad experiences at this critical time, so we haven’t put a link to it on our main Web site yet.”
When Portola customers log in to the site, they are on the fast trak ordering page, whick is set up by Portola sales reps to reflect what the customer usually orders. Each cap and label the customer orders is represented by a color thumbnail image that, when clicked, expands into a bigger, more detailed photo. An item number and product name accompany each cap, as well as the price per unit. Buchanan is hoping that these features will solve the abundance of “misorders” Portola receives when customers fax or call in their orders. “A common order was: ‘Send me 1ꯠ of those red caps with the label on them.’ If there were a change in personnel [at Portola], they wouldn’t know what that guy meant by ‘red caps,’” he says.
