“We have an approach at Atlantic that is both socially responsible and extremely cautious to ensure we are delivering quality on a consistent basis to our customers,” he says. According to Perry, there are five rules to follow when looking overseas for products.

1.  Find Your Person. It’s critical, says Perry, to have someone local to the market where you’re sourcing who can ensure quality, speak the local language and act on problems as they arise. For Chinese suppliers, Atlantic contracts with a Canadian with deep connections in his native China. “Our guy, Henry, is always looking for good quality suppliers for us,” says Perry.
2. Ensure Quality and Consistency. It’s not uncommon to receive a stunning set of samples before placing an order only to receive the first shipment at a completely different quality level. Insist on a set of samples that will act as a benchmark for all orders, advises Perry.
3. Set Savings Benchmarks. If you’re not saving 20% by sourcing products overseas, there’s really no value. When one factors in the shipping lead times and risk factors, a lesser savings starts to look like a bad gamble.
4. Beware Chinese New Year. To the uninitiated, national holidays like Chinese New Year can spell massive supply chain disruption. From February 1 to mid-March, Chinese factories all but shut down. If your  order isn’t shipped by then, it will have to wait.
5. Take a Hard Look at Local. While the benefits of cost savings are tangible and easy to quantify, peace of mind can be far more valuable, says Perry. If your supplier is down the road, you can easily check quality, order in smaller quantities, ensure delivery and most importantly, support your local economy.

“Our business with the Mint started with corrugated boxes to hold coins. Gradually, we added other workplace items, like safety goggles and poly-liners,” recalls Perry, whose division carries over 3,000 SKUs from packaging to office supplies. During a tour of the Mint’s production facility in Manitoba, Perry and corrugated sales representative Steve Hance had an idea that would further extend the limits of Atlantic’s traditional supply chain.

“The Mint is one of the world’s most technologically sophisticated producers of currencies,” explains Perry. “So they strike coins for over 47 counties. We saw how they were shipping the coins for the Philippines and the light just went on.” What Perry and Steve saw were coins being loaded into 55-gallon steel drums.

“When we saw that we said to ourselves, ‘Those drums are packaging; we do packaging at Atlantic.’” Perry approached the purchasing manager and asked if Atlantic could quote on supplying the Mint with steel drums.  “At that point, we went beyond traditional Gap Selling where you try to find ways to sell more from your portfolio of products,” say Perry.  Instead, he felt his organization—which positions itself as an outsourced supply chain service for its clients—was  nimble enough to go out and find a better solution for his customer’s needs.

Within a very short period, the supply chain division was able to find a manufacturer of steel drums in Burlington, Ontario. He and his team underwent a rigorous check of the company’s plant, quality and background. That done, Atlantic went back to the Mint to pitch for the steel drum business. And they won.

“When we presented this success story at an Atlantic sales team meeting, it really touched a nerve. All of a sudden we started seeing people reaching across divisions to team-sell to clients,” says Perry. To him, it all comes down to stepping outside your comfort zone. “Walk the plant floor with your client,” he advises, “you will be amazed what you will find!”

Chantler, a seventy-five-year-old family business based in Mississauga, supplies flexible packaging for consumer packaged goods such as breads, fruits and vegetables. Starting with the calls from global retailers such as Walmart to package goods in more responsible ways, pressure has mounted all the way down the supply chain to respond. For Atlantic, that meant attaining the PACsecure/HACCP Food Safety Certification, only the third company in Canada to do so as of February 2010. PACsecure is a Canadian-authored set of food safety protocols for packaging converters intended to harmonize with the international protocol long used by the global food and beverage industry: Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP). For more information, click here.

“Chantler operates under HACCP guidelines and Atlantic has PACsecure/HACCP, so Grant just connected the dots and decided there was great value in communicating that to Chantler’s customers,” remembers Dzus. Within six months of coming up with the idea,

Grant Ferguson, Chantler Packaging and Mike Dzus, Atlantic Packaging with PACsecure certified boxes

Atlantic began to produce boxes for Chantler that proudly displayed the PACsecure logo. Says Dzus, “With food safety concerns so high right now, this logo adds a lot of value for our customers. It’s the payback on getting the certification since Atlantic is practically alone in this space.”

From his perspective, Ferguson sees the HACCP and PACsecure certifications as extra levels of quality that differentiate his company’s products from the competition. “While HACCP does not require our corrugated secondary packaging to be certified food safe, the spirit of the certification is to take extra care with any item that is coming into close contact with food. So, Atlantic’s efforts allow us to give our end customer an extra level of confidence in our products and another reason to keep their business with Chantler.” According to Ferguson, Chantler has been working toward attaining the ISO 2200 certification this fall, which combines food safety and packaging printing/manufacturing protocols.

Dzus says his team is standardizing their approach to using the PACsecure and other certifications such as FSC (Forestry Stewardship Council) in their sales process. “We’re not just providing boxes. We’re delivering on a promise to the end consumer and that starts right at the beginning of the supply chain.”

Abraham and Phil Granovsky founded Atlantic Paper Products Limited in 1945 as a paper bag maker on King Street in Toronto, and later expanded to making corrugated boxes.  In those days, recalls Keeley, getting access to virgin paper was difficult due to wartime quotas. This dynamic, Keeley is convinced, led to the bold move a few years later that would one day put Atlantic at the vanguard of Canadian packaging manufacturers.

The critical decision, made by Phil and Irving Granovsky, Abraham’s sons, was to invest several million dollars in a German-made Fourdrinier container board machine on the bet that they could get it to work with recycled raw materials.  In the early sixties, boxes made from recycled materials and manufactured on a cylinder paper machine had a critical design flaw: they lacked cross-linking in their fibers; that is, the fibers were bound to each
other vertically on a sheet but not horizontally as well making them significantly weaker than paper made from virgin pulp.  This paper was both very thick and porous.  If the Granovskys could get the Fourdrinier to run with recycled material, it could have some cost advantage over virgin pulp producers and solve the supply chain issue.

“There were many 20-hour days,” Keeley recalls, “with the Atlantic Team getting the machine to work.”  And finally it did.  The litmus test was set by the Campbell’s Soup
Company.  Then Corporate Director for Purchasing, Doug Gendron, challenged Atlantic to make a box out of recycled paper that would hold up to stress tests on par with a virgin box. “When our box did it, we won the account,” says Keeley, a note of triumph still in his
telling.  “And it was a big account.”  All testing, as a matter of interest, was done by an accredited, independent testing facility.

Forty-three years later, Roger Keeley believes the decision to move into recycled packaging, as forward thinking as it was then, was driven by the Granovskys’ desire to control their own destiny. “When Phil and Irving were not able to get access to virgin paper,” says Keeley, “they turned to a more plentiful supply of post-consumer waste and a
strong move for environmental responsibility as well.”

If necessity was the mother of this invention, personal dynamics was the key to successful execution. “You couldn’t find two more different personalities than Phil and Irving,” Keeley reminisces. Phil, older by 14 years, was a smaller man with an outsized personality that made his presence in a room known. His reputation as a global philanthropist
with a natural magnetism made him an ideal face for the company.  Irving, taller and younger, is an engineer by trade who attended Harvard University — a strong motivator and true leader with an analytical mind for manufacturing focused on developing the operational side of the business with unparalleled success. And together, it just worked.

“At that time, we were heavily focused on supplying grocery stores and food service operators with packaging,” recalls Perry. ‘The Branches’, as Atlantic’s supply chain centres were called, then provided customers with everything from tin trays for prepared foods to the overwrap that went over them. “Then global giants like Unisource and Bunzl began to buy up national grocery accounts with cost plus pricing and we were out. We had to reinvent ourselves fast,” says Perry, a sense of urgency still in his telling.

The Supply Chain’s first move was to scan the market for industry verticals that had packaging problems to be solved.  For industrial and manufacturing clients, the group found two persistent problems existed: one, high carrying costs for a wide array of upplies; and two, difficulty with inventory management. Leveraging the already strong relationships the Atlantic Group had with this target market, the Supply Chain group was born.

“The old model of ‘Here’s my portfolio with my price list’ was no longer going to work for us,” says Perry. “We became an extension of our clients’ purchasing departments, helping them source whatever they needed to support their processes and maintain just enough inventory.” With over 3,000 individual SKUs—many of them unique to customers— and distribution centres in four Ontario cities, the Supply Chain group has become highly focused on streamlining its customers’ purchasing processes. In many cases, Perry’s team knows his customers’ production schedules.

“Our customers understand they are paying for suppliers that can only offer them one or two products. They pay for the six trucks delivering products instead of one. They pay also in their time with issuing eight purchase orders instead of one.” And now, with the Supply Chain group tied into many sales calls with Atlantic’s corrugated division, the synergies are immense. Essentially, Perry sums up, it has meant changing from a product sales concentration to a customer solution focus. And it has made all the difference.