Transcript

Welcome to On the Pulse of Packaging we’re talking about onshoring a topic that’s reshaping American manufacturing and the packaging solutions playing a critical role welcome to this episode of On the Pulse of Packaging I’m your host Shannon Winans and today we have Bob DiSanto, sales manager for PAC Machinery. Hi Bob…hey Shannon I am good it’s good to see you. How are you good to see you too ….doing well…

Bob’s is going to tell us a little bit about what’s going on in his territory lately because he’s seeing an interesting trend…Bob.

Absolutely I think it’s kind of a current trend that’s accelerating but it’s uh repatriation also known as onshoring this is bringing manufacturing back to the United States. Lately, especially in the last few weeks, been seeing a lot of this there’s a lot of different reasons it’s happening economic you know companies that need to do that to because of the tariffs and the different things that are going on geopolitically that bring manufacturing back here uh technology is causing a lot of that too there’s ways of automating there’s our machinery that can actually provide a lot of labor savings and efficiencies so the technology has been improving here so we can remove a lot of that labor and there’s some strategic factors as well where strategically companies want to have their products made here domestically and not offshore and uh it’s definitely something that I’m hearing in conversations over and over again it’s a recurring theme and it’s a trend that’s kind of I see increasing quite a bit.

Give us some examples of some of the businesses that uh like what kind of products or what do these companies do/

Yeah it’s kind of all over the board. Recently last week I met with a company and they’re making products that are used in the military and because of national security, a lot of these things were offshored and we found out that we can’t get them fast enough and it’s not in the best interest of our of our nation so for national security reasons they’re bringing that product manufacturing back here and so they’re needing help with automation with packaging systems that’s being done offshore they need to bring that back here and have the equipment available to do that. This really accelerated this it caused companies kind of look at where they’re getting product from and I had another company that’s making pieces and parts for bicycles imagine that bicycles had all moved offshore the manufacturing pretty much but uh when COVID hit they had a hard time getting some of the components and they realized that if they didn’t figure that out they would be out of business and if there was another event, another situation, they basically told me “Bob we’ll be out of out of business.” So they started this process a few years back and it’s accelerated now where they’re looking to actually make all the different components here and packaging them up here as well where before they didn’t have that need. There’s strategic factors Shannon too as well I get it on my end uh customers ask me you know what machines do you have that are made here and I run through our equipment that that is and they are making sure that when they’re buying products for their equipment components they’re going out to their vendors and saying “Where are you getting this from are you producing this domestically or is this being done offshore?” They don’t want to be in a situation where if you know these tariffs accelerate if there’s another event that they can’t get some of these parts and there’s going to be supply chain issues all over again so it’s just for strategic reasons so that they could you know manage their business and I’m hearing that as well.

Talk about some of the solutions that they’ve been looking at or something uh some of the pec machinery solutions that you’re recommending to them.

Sure so when they’re bringing this product back it’s not as simple as saying okay we’re going to make it here they need equipment they need their manufacturing equipment they need retooling um and then when it comes down stream to being packaged up that’s where we come in that’s where they’re picking up the phone and calling us and saying “Hey look this is the product this is the package we’re looking to do this here we don’t have the equipment to do this now.” So that involves a lot of our bagging machinery and uh as you know we produce a lot of different types of machine that are all doing similar processes they’re basically taking material whether plastic or paper and making a bag either forming it around a product and so they could be filled and then sealed so we have our flow wrappers that are you know the horizontal that’s taking product horizontally um and filling it and forming the bag and then sealing the bag it could be printed film clear film either or we’ve got our horizontal high-speed machines that are taking uh product and conveying it down a conveyor and creating a bag and that bag could be printed material clear material it could be fulfillment film like a mailer film and it could be shrink film as well so where they’re actually shrinking the film around the product and that’s for high-speed applications with higher volumes and then vertically we’re doing that with our auto bag roll bag systems that’s auto producing and dispensing a bag it could print right on that bag as you know or it could put a label and put a label on that bag so it presents the bag and that is being incorporated into a lot of atomization as well either robots putting the product in a counting system a conveyor system a vibratory system where it’s dropping the product in automatically but even if they’re doing it manual you know even if they’re going from just putting product in a bag manually to providing it through one of our systems you know they’re removing uh a lot of labor there so yeah it’s pretty exciting the trend it’s producing a lot of opportunities for us well.

Thanks so much for your time Bob I think this was very helpful for a lot of those companies that are starting to come back to the United States to do their manufacturing and bringing that back here and creating jobs and hopefully buying packaging equipment right absolutely thank you Shannon thank you Bob are you considering bringing your production back to the US explore how our packaging solutions can make it a profitable decision contact us today>