Full steam ahead for Avery Denison
TWO years after its took over its competitor Jac, leading self-adhesive label materials supplier Avery Dennison has emerged with a rationalised product range, rationalised production and a new service offering label printers an opportunity to cut their costs.
During those two years, the merged operation in Australia has reduced the number of its core products from 1200 to just 200.
Avery Dennison roll materials marketing manager for Australia and New Zealand, Andrew Crawford, said that just over two years ago, Jac was a bigger player in the Australian market than in many markets where the two companies competed.
When the US parent of Avery Dennison took over the worldwide business of German private company Jackstadt, local management discovered the two companies had competing offerings in almost all sectors of the labels market.
“In terms of pressure sensitive substrates for primary labels, the two companies were of very similar size in Australasia,” Crawford said.
Both Jac and Avery Dennison had full scale production facilities in Australia and these were among the first things to be rationalised.
The former Avery plant in Elizabeth, in Adelaide’s northern suburbs, is now concentrating on hot melt rubber adhesive based products and the former Jac plant at Tottenham in Melbourne’s western suburbs concentrates on acrylic emulsion substrates.
“By volume, production was about 55 per cent hot melt and 45 per cent acrylic emulsion.
The rationalisation of the product line from 1200 down to 200 appeared more radical than it really was.
“Where we found ourselves with two directly competing products, we eliminated the one which was less successful, thus allowing the market to decide which one we kept.
The company had also eliminated hundreds of niche products, in order to concentrate on the 200 core substrates and offer a better service on those products.
“In effect, however, the other 800 products are still available through our mix-and-match service where we will provide any combination of face stock, adhesive and liner that a label printer requires.
“So in effect, not only can those other 800-odd products still be produced to order, a much larger number of products can be made in theory, if there is a demand for them,” Crawford said.
The company had made several million dollars worth of investment in its plants in the past two years, the single biggest item being a new coating head at the Melbourne plant.
Crawford said another innovation had been the introduction of its Exact system which allowed customers order the exact width they required to within 1mm and elimiate on wastage.
29-Jun-2004