Development Center of Excellence
Improve Efficiency, Consistency and Organization
Packaging departments are under constant pressure to keep up with brand growth, adjust to acquisitions and deliver against priorities to enhance sustainability and reduce costs. These challenges call for packaging strategies that drive value, exhibit greater agility, improve organization and accelerate speed to market.
Adept Group’s Packaging Development Center of Excellence approach provides a packaging function model that tackles these challenges head-on, accelerating future competitiveness and enabling faster growth and enhanced profits. It aligns the entire packaging department to execute its strategy and deliver against its goals in a reliable, repeatable manner.
Package Development Center of Excellence Solutions
A PackDev CoE is a model for managing a packaging department. The model focuses on strong and well-aligned fundamental concepts that are common to many successful organizations.
- People — enabling cognitive ability and promoting productive interpersonal interactions.
- Processes — Aligned to enable efficiency.
- Systems — Leveraging the power of technology to unburden teams.
The Adept Group Model
Implementing a well-run CoE enables an organization to drive consistent, forecastable value from its packaging operations. It makes the people, processes and the systems in place fundamentally stronger while aligning them to execute against the packaging department’s goals.
Adept Group’s model for a PackDev CoE contains four key components:
- Providing Solutions
- Knowledge Management
- Team Development
- Systems & Governance
Executing Packaging Development Initiatives
This leg of the model, the execution of packaging development initiatives, is easy to observe because it involves the day-to-day functions of packaging teams.
This packaging process addresses the basic ways in which the department supports the organization as a whole through strategies strongly aligned with the brand’s overall strategy. Execution of this process leads to:
Disciplined management
Development of packaging systems that can be implemented at scale
Maintaining high standards that can be followed throughout the department
Implementing best-in-class technologies and practices
Leveraging sourcing to identify and implement the best components and materials
Once those packaging systems are in place, the CoE provides opportunities to continually improve upon solutions to enhance functionality and efficiency. This base business support creates a stable operation that delivers optimized value to the entire organization and helps to establish and maintain a competitive advantage.
This same process can also be geared to provide ad-hoc, need-based solutions. It helps to evaluate incoming needs based on their organizational impact and their priority among the department’s and the organization’s overall needs. As business conditions change, a packaging department organized under a CoE model can develop individual solutions to new challenges and drive agile implementation of those solutions. All of this is done in a way that manages risk to the organization.
Knowledge Management
The focus here is how the packaging department can make the best use of institutional knowledge and convert new learnings into lasting knowledge that can be implemented and shared throughout the department to create thoughtfully engineered solutions.People — enabling cognitive ability and promoting productive interpersonal interactions.
In Knowledge Management we have the creation process, comprised of developing knowledge that enhances the competitive advantage a CoE provides. This is done by the accumulation and implementation of knowledge that allows the department to work faster, more accurately and at a lower cost. Developing a repository through which that knowledge can be shared, managed and used across the packaging department to drive standardization rounds out this process.
Team Development
The care, support, and development of a packaging department’s most valuable assets are its people.
Systems & Governance
A component that organizes all other aspects, Systems & Governance is crucial to executing against CoE correctly. Without a good system for managing the CoE, it is not practical to sustain the model over the long term.
Key elements of Systems & Governance:
- Organized system of leadership at all team levels
- Strong culture that drives job satisfaction within the department
- Defined set of career paths that guide achievement throughout the department
- Administration of the CoE (setting and adhering to well-planned budgets & goals)
- Management of data and software that enhance the functionality of a packaging department
Our Expertise
Adept group has more than 10 years’ experience developing, implementing and improving on our Packing Development Center of Excellence model for brands of all sizes and in all industries.
Our broad range of experience across CPG, food & beverage, life sciences and industrial/hard goods industries allows us to understand organizational challenges and provide training and high-level insights optimized for growth.
We provide a modular architecture that can be aligned with an organization’s dynamic needs and geared to implement seamlessly to meet cross-functional goals.