Page 20 - Packaging News Magazine May-June 2020

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COMPANY PROFILE | www.packagingnews.com.au | May-June 2020
Multipack LJM: Copackers of the future
Multipack LJM is a newly merged co-packer that serves blue-chip manufacturers, international FMCG companies, local manufacturers, and brand custodians. PKN reports.
“Was it frustrating? Of course it was. But, in the end, we did it and I can honestly say that not a pallet was despatched incorrectly.”
Rawson says now that all has set- tled, he can say the merger has defi- nitely worked out well.
“The blending of cultures is always complex in any type of merger, but both teams could see what the other party had to offer and knew that there were benefits to it. A lot of the cultural issues were quite easily resolved,” he says.
BENEFICIAL TECH
Rawson says Multipack LJM has instituted Qlik Sense as their busi- ness intelligence system, which inte- grates data extracted from the SAP ERP (enterprise resource planning system) and a newly implemented warehouse management system (WMS) to drive decision making.
Qlik Sense allows Multipack LJM to step into a new level of analytics and business visibility, Rawson says. The data collected from sensors mounted on the lines is compared against users’ reporting on tablets to validate data accuracy. This, he says, transformed the organisation meth- odology from reactive to proactive.
ULTIPACK LJM packs and handles all manner of FMCG products including canned food, confec- tionery, alcohol, tea, coffee, dairy, frozen foods, personal care products, pharmaceutical products, and cosmetics.
When the merger was final- ised last year, the Australian co- packing industry was worth about $300m, according to director and founder of LJM Lance Miles. With a turnover of approximately $75m, the newly merged company captures about 25 per cent of the market share.
Adam Rawson, Multipack LJM CEO says the company now has “scale, capability, and flexibility”.
THE MERGER
Rawson says what Multipack brought to the partnership with LJM – over and above its contract packing exper- tise – was expertise in manufacturing processes re-engineering, where tech- nology is leveraged to scale the opera- tions and adapt to customer needs.
“Multipack is very process driven,” he says. “Also, by joining together, there was a saturation of work that allowed us to have better specialists in different positions. For example, we didn’t have a CFO before.
“I always said a successful merger would be when one plus one equals three. I’m proud to say that after 10 months, one plus one is equal to three-plus, which is great.”
Rawson says the practicalities of the merger were challenging, but in the end, the company could house all of operations under a unified pro- cess and system without a hitch.
“For example, we have a customer that requires us to operate two shifts a day, six days a week for,” he says.
“During the merger operations, we couldn’t take any time off. We had the one day off, Sunday, to identify and scan every single pallet into our new warehouse management sys- tem, and then, come 7.30 Monday morning to run the customers’ jobs on a different process and system.