Esko, EPSA and Pack Avenir launch a Packaging Center of Excellence to support brand owners in France

Esko is a global supplier of integrated software and hardware solutions tailored to accelerate the process for packaged products. EPSA is a major player in the creation and production of sustainable business performance. Pack Avenir is a company specialized in the design of packaging and their technical specifications. Together, they announce the creation of a partnership around a Packaging Center of Excellence to better support French companies looking for operational optimization of their packaging and to implement sustainable practices.

Defining a packaging strategy to reduce the impact on the planet

Companies are central to the construction of the world of tomorrow. The transformation of our practices and the reduction of our impact on the planet require a total societal effort. The industrial sector is already well involved in reducing greenhouse gas emissions: In France, companies have reduced their GHG emissions by 46% between 1990 and 2019. This is a necessary effort, but unfortunately insufficient to achieve the objectives set during the Paris agreement of 2015.

The waste created by the industrial sector’s packaging practices is a major source of pollution and a concern to citizens and political activists. The use of plastic in packaging must be controlled to reduce the environmental impact. Several laws, such as the AGEC, target the reduction, or even the substitution, of plastic packaging in the medium term.

Companies must now combine the optimization of their packaging strategy with a reduction in packaging expenses by implementing more virtuous practices. To approach this subject efficiently, they must rethink the management of their packaging activities, which are too often siloed, poorly rationalized, and often not collaborative. To answer these questions, Esko, EPSA, and Pack Avenir have created an alliance around a Packaging Center of Excellence, which offers packaging optimization solutions across the entire business value chain.

Understanding the current state to globalize and accelerate the transformation of optimizations

There is an urgent need to act, to help companies lay the foundations for a sustainable packaging strategy. Packaging optimization actions often respond to a particular need of a brand, a product or a production site: everyone will seek to deploy an individual approach to achieve their objectives. But how to avoid the duplication of one-off efforts for non-optimized results?

To achieve the long-term objectives of a more global strategy, it is above all necessary to carry out an audit of practices, centralize and standardize technical specifications, identify and map optimizations and thus define a roadmap. The first operational optimization levers will appear when the company has a 360° vision of packaging optimization. This initial audit requires the involvement of all stakeholders, business experts, as well as digital tools capable of centralizing and processing data.

Digitizing to control the packaging life cycle

Despite the awareness of companies to accelerate the digitalization of organizations, digital transformation in packaging management is not widespread. Digitization makes it possible to centralize technical specifications, manage artworks and other content, simplify approval workflows, and accelerate time to market. The management of the specificities of each item, which can vary between countries and packaging types, therefore needs 360° visibility, which offers a better reading of the avenues for optimization. By combining the know-how of EPSA Packaging experts and buyers with Esko's digital solution, the Packaging Center of Excellence aims to produce a complete audit of their customers' packaging actions to help them identify all the optimization levers available for their packaging needs.

Rethinking packaging - why business experts seek to optimize the value chain

The Packaging Center of Excellence is the only solution on the market capable of providing comprehensive support to companies in their search for better packaging management. Once the initial audit has been carried out, EPSA experts support the company in defining the new strategy to be implemented. After having defined the objectives and actions to be prioritized, Pack Avenir engineers can develop new packaging, redesign in "Design to Value" mode, and implement packaging optimization levers, including laboratory tests and compliance with all required norms and standards. Esko's digital tools allow companies to centralize and manage all packaging data and specifications in a collaborative platform, while ensuring quality at each stage with automated approval workflows.

Developing more responsible packaging for sustainable performance

More efficient management combined with a 360° vision of packaging processes enables companies to completely rethink the approach to the eco-friendly packaging design and the reduction of its environmental impact. It is only thanks to this global vision of all practices that companies will be able to achieve their responsible purchasing objectives.

The last pillar of the Packaging Center of Excellence aims to support companies in the transformation of their practices and sustainable performance.

This union of EPSA, Pack Avenir, and Esko allows companies to improve their packaging management, from the centralization and verification of technical specifications to the transformation and deployment of optimization paths through digitalization. The Packaging Center of Excellence is equipped to support any project no matter the size, partially or in full - from the launch of a single primary, secondary, or tertiary packaging to the end-to-end creation of the entire packaging strategy to its full deployment.

The new Packaging Center of Excellence seeks to provide significant optimization and sustainable business transformation to a sector under-exploited by the industry due to its siloed, disconnected, and immature processes.