No industry is without its trials. These are the problems ours is facing right now – and which can be helped by automation.

Not enough hours in the day? This is a tale far older than the packaging industry – though this doesn’t make the growing time constraints easier for you to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

More, more, more: 31% of our customers claim throughput time as their biggest pain point. So, you’re probably dealing with this issue too, right? The pressure to get packaging out the door is increasing, as businesses like yours try to turn around a higher number of smaller jobs efficiently, with shortened production times – all while maintaining high quality. This is an undoubtedly large challenge for our industry right now.

Is this your biggest problem too? Learn how to overcome it in our whitepaper ‘Why saving just 10 minutes leads to 50% more jobs’.

Not enough hands: What about staff-related problems? 22% of you have difficulty finding and retaining skilled people with the right attitude or culture fit to take on all this additional work. Faced with this issue, companies must choose between ploughing additional time and effort into their recruitment drive, increasing reliance on temp personnel, or loading extra hours onto their team and compensating accordingly with overtime payments. And quite frankly, none of these options seem the ideal solution.

Sick of reprints: 14% of our customers cite customer complaints, the number of revisions required per job, and reprints as one of their top five challenges. Of course, upset customers don’t place highly on most companies’ wish lists – nor does the reputational damage.

It’s all personal: As brands seek to differentiate themselves with colorful, experimental packaging – and to tailor their product packaging more specifically to the end user’s needs, often with multiple aspects of personalization – 14% of our customers say the increasing demand for personalization is a challenge for them.

Money matters: The last in the top five challenges our customers mentioned was price pressure. 11% of you say you’re being driven down in price by aggressively cost-conscious customers. Making less margin on more time-consuming work sounds neither fun nor remotely sustainable.

Put simply, it has not been the easiest of times. Luckily, better days are ahead. The solution to each of these packaging industry woes is really quite simple! Automation. By automating time-consuming, non-value processes you can increase throughput, reduce errors and ultimately increase profits.

Intrigued? You should be. The next step in your journey? Read our whitepaper ‘Is automation right for you’ to help you decide on your next move.