The company
About Pack Company
Pack Company is a Dutch independent specialist and full-service supplier of cardboard packaging. Drawing on a broad network of factories, the company helps customers with a wide range of packaging challenges. For part of its international road transport, Pack Company works through Cargors with fixed transport partners, mainly for transport from Poland and Turkey to the Netherlands.
But finding the right box is one thing. Getting it to the customer at the right moment is sometimes a whole different puzzle.
And that is exactly where it turns out that logistics is not always about as many carriers as possible or complicated technology. Sometimes it is mostly about knowing who to call.
Not every order is a full load
A box is a box. Or so you would think.
Until a customer needs several sizes. One type of packaging comes from one factory, the other from somewhere else, and neither order happens to fill exactly one truck.
That is when selling packaging also becomes a bit of playing Tetris with trucks.
Pack Company works with a wide range of factories. That gives the freedom to find the right packaging solution for customers, but logistically it does not always make the world any simpler.
Wherever possible, shipments are combined into full loads. Only, not every type of box sits at the same factory. So the puzzling starts: what comes from where, what can go together and when does it need to be at the customer?
In the end that customer does not need to know how complicated it was behind the scenes. What they mainly want to know is: when do my products arrive?
The challenges
Transport? Sometimes in-house, sometimes not
In many cases Pack Company does not have to arrange the transport itself. But there are also moments when it is more interesting to keep control in its own hands.
Previously that ran through various carriers, or the transport was arranged by the factory in question. That could work perfectly well, but communication and the lead time of loads in particular sometimes made it unnecessarily difficult.
Because the moment you have to commit to a delivery slot towards a customer yourself, “we'll hear about it in due course” suddenly is not a particularly pleasant logistics system.
So what Pack Company wanted above all was more clarity. Not necessarily a completely new logistics world. Just knowing where you stand.
How Cargors helped
International transport from Poland and Turkey
For part of that transport, Pack Company now works through Cargors. This mainly involves two international goods flows: Poland and Turkey to the Netherlands.
Strikingly, the collaboration is not about placing every shipment with yet another carrier. Quite the opposite.
Pack Company works mainly with the same transport partners. That creates fixed arrangements and short lines of communication.
For a company that combines products from different factories while wanting to give its own customers clarity, it is precisely that predictability that matters.
The gain? Pack Company names three things itself: overview, time and costs.
Not revolutionary. But exactly the things you would rather spend less time on during a busy working day.
The results
And then it is suddenly past six
The most interesting logistical moments simply cannot always be captured in a dashboard.
Sometimes something still has to be arranged at the end of the day. A transport has to be adjusted. Things have to be switched around. Or a solution still has to be found for something that is running differently than planned.
That is when Pack Company and Titus from Cargors are regularly in touch to see what is still possible. Sometimes even after working hours.
Not particularly scalable, perhaps. But effective.
“I always have the feeling that I am taken seriously and that they genuinely do their best to arrange something for us when that is needed.”
And perhaps a small example like that says more about logistics than a dashboard full of KPIs. Because in the end that load simply has to roll.
What's next
That's how you go the extra mile for each other
Asked what had surprised Pack Company most about the collaboration, the answer was not a technical one. No feature. No algorithm. No complicated logistics term.
The answer was about people.
“Everyone I speak to genuinely wants to help and sincerely does their best.”
That personal side turns out to be an important part of the collaboration for Pack Company.
“We have a really great working relationship and that matters. That's how you go the extra mile for each other.”
Maybe that is what good logistics is
To the outside world, Pack Company is about cardboard packaging.
Behind the scenes it is sometimes about different factories, combining orders, filling trucks, transport from Poland and Turkey, keeping an eye on delivery times and making one more call when the working day is actually already over.
In the end the customer should notice as little of that as possible.
They simply want the right packaging. At the right moment.
And maybe good logistics is ultimately exactly that: quite a few puzzle pieces moving behind the scenes, while at the front it stays surprisingly simple.
