April 25, 2014
Jack Ampuja: President, Supply Chain Optimizers & Executive in Residence, Niagara University
Jack has over 35 years of supply chain management experience with five Fortune 500 firms including Senior Vice President of Operations at a multi-billion dollar international company heading up a $200 million division with 800 employees. Jack is a regular speak-er on supply chain issues and trends making over 80 presentations at conferences or workshops in the past five years. Audiences include Council of Supply Chain Manage-ment, and Supply Chain & Logistics Canada. He co-chairs the Logistics Council for the Buffalo Niagara Partnership and also serves on their Canada Council. He is a member of the Planning Group positioning the Buffalo Niagara Region as an International Trade Gateway as well as a 30 year member of the Council of Supply Chain Management Pro-fessionals and serves on the Western New York Roundtable board. He also serves on the board of directors of Continental 1 [Toronto to Miami Trade Corridor] and as an advisor to Kong & Allan Consulting of Shanghai and TSE Global Logistics of Atlanta.
Packaging Optimization: The Route to Reducing Costs & Carbon Footprint
Although Bob Delaney identified Packaging Optimization as a major opportunity for logistics efficiency in the 1998 State of Logistics Report it continues to be overlooked and under-emphasized in most companies. After Wal-Mart established a 5% packaging reduction target for its suppliers in late 2006, optimization has become a major focus at many companies. The publicly announced savings targets are $3.5 billion to Wal-Mart and double that to its suppliers. This magnitude of savings has raised interest in packaging optimization to an all-time high.
While on size alone no other company can equal the dollars that Wal-Mart will achieve, most others have bigger % opportuni-ties because their supply chains are not as efficient to begin with. Over 500 packaging optimization projects have proven that the average cost reduction opportunity is 10% or double what Wal-Mart has projected.
Pick-pack companies have an even bigger opportunity because of business complexity – thousands of unique shipments lead to huge volumes of partially filled boxes; most e-commerce shippers end up shipping more than 50% air and filler which isn’t efficient for shipper or receiver and terrible for the environment.