attractive ZombieCans with quality as good or better than the originals. With feedback and support from industry partners, we are building progressively more capable hardware integrations based on cutting-edge automation products in a step-wise development plan that will produce millions of ZombieCans per month. This will make it easier to attract and retain a qualified labor force by reducing hand labor, improving work conditions, and increasing per-person productivity. Martin Killgallon, The Ohio Art Company The events of the past few years have sped up reshoring efforts of manufactured goods and components. This represents both an opportunity and a challenge for our industry. Ohio Art is focusing on re-positioning the company for this opportunity through investments in our people, new equipment and renewed focus on our supply chain including developing new relationships, cultivating existing relationships and working to ensure we have reliable secondary suppliers in place. Developing the most dynamic manufacturing sector in the world is exciting – as a country, we have done it before and can do it again!
Our solution: Investing in capacity regionally where it best supports customers but continuing to back their projects with design/deco guidance from our global team of experts. Levi Boss, Director, Ball Corporation First, education and workforce development. Second, addressing the skills gap by collaborating with industry experts to identify the skills and knowledge required for deco jobs. We will increase access to job training and career development recourses, especially in the deco communities. Tim Feaver, CANIMAL What do you see as the most pressing challenge? As is commonly said: when people are happy, they drink; when people are sad, they drink. In that respect, our go-to-market plan of initially targeting brewers helps to recession-proof CANIMAL and our ZombieCans™ product ramp up. Also, the need for brewers and can decorators to go greener isn’t being dampened, so a product that saves more than 95% of the energy and water (like ours) is still in high demand. That said, we are also making sure brewers know that the right can-packaging strategy doesn’t just save money - it can generate revenue! A green, innovative product like ZombieCans™ offers new profits to canmakers, an attractive product differentiator to packagers and supply chains, and a superior platform for digital direct-to-can printing. Our biggest challenge now is ramping our pilot production capacity rapidly enough to meet demand - both from customers and from canmakers looking to process their unused but unsellable printed “orphan” cans. Plus, attracting and retaining production operators (aka staffing) is a continuing challenge. What has been your solution? We continue to double down on communicating the message that innovation = increased revenue potential. This is more than a savings platform, it’s a revenue producing platform. On the production side, CANIMAL designed and built a pilot production line with modest capacity, proving that we can convert printed unused “orphan” cans into
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FUNDAMETALS Newsletter
Q1 2023 [9]
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