Functional role and marketing
A package is expected to be functional and must adequately protect the product upto the point of sales and beyond. It should provide consumers with easy opening and reclosing features designed to assist in the use of the product. This applies not only to consumer type packages, but increasingly also to other containers meant for industrial and military items. Simultaneously and in fact more predominantly packaging has to fulfil its critically important function of marketing since the Indian economy has expanded and sales have displaced production as the key factor to business success. This means that though a package is the last link in product communications and also on the crowded shelves of a super-market, it must necessarily serve as a “silent salesman” pronouncing its own complete story as a product of the company and that too without any human help. Thus the contribution that packaging adds to the product goes far beyond the bill-board function.
Packaging directors or coordinators are increasingly needed in industry. They are none others but the packaging specialists who are called upon to act as staff advisers on such technical matters and to coordinate the packaging development. The requisite knowledge is necessary and has to be attained by concerned product managers. It is highly desirable that the executive in charge of packaging must either know or have access to technical knowledge on the materials and methods for constructing packages. He should also be able to gauge whether his desired construction can be produced economically by outside suppliers or handled efficiently on packaging lines in his own plant.
Coordinators can be trained in marketing, but they become more effective when their training is supplemented by additional background in chemistry, technology of materials, in printing and mechanical engineering.
Packaging materials supply field is also a new opening in our country. For people desiring to pursue a career in packaging supply field a combination of talents of the aforesaid type will be equally advantageous. In order to succeed at selling packing materials or machines in the present day competitive market, a salesman must have a convincing knowledge of how his product will be used by packagers. He should also be able to offer creative ideas on techniques. Many packaging supply firms, i.e., companies that convert basic raw materials into furnished cartons, cans and bottles, etc., employ experts in printing, graphic arts, structural packaging design and mechanical engineering, to assist their salesmen. Similarly, basic manufacturers of raw materials like plastic resins, metal sheet and foil also employ packaging technologists. Their jobs is to assist the customers who buy those raw materials.
Independent packaging consultants, design firms and contract packagers are closely associated with the sales side of packaging. Opportunities for sales-oriented people are going up as more and more companies are starting to recognise the need to utilise the services of professional packaging men with marketing specialities. It is in sharp contrast to the position prevailing earlier, when use of professional men was in its infancy for consumer products and for industrial and military items it was still less.
Packaging production
New packaging materials such as plastics, also the creation of new packaging forms such as plastic squeeze bottles and aerosol cans could have posed difficult manufacturing and handling problems on production lines, but the engineers by taking care of the same, have attained new importance. They are no longer regarded simply as experts in industrial, mechanical or electrical engineering, who apply classical principles to the solution of the problems but they have become engineering personnel with broader perception, capable of creating equipment that produces economically without deviating from the marketing objectives of the company, even when as a rule engineering being a precise form of technology does not admit subjective considerations such as marketing.
Employment of engineers is rising because the speed of packaging operations has increased enormously. In recent years old informal methods are no longer practical. Mechanic’s approach gives way to faster methods resulting from rising machine speed, which in turn makes even mechanical controls obsolete replacing them with electronic controls. So mechanical engineers in packaging companies are being joined by electrical and electronic engineers.
Materials engineering
Before the Second World War packaging was a simple job. Packaging men only needed to learn about the properties and applications of wood, paper, tin-plated steel and glass as plastics industry had not yet been born. It emerged after the war and now plastic is produced in such a large volume that it is possible to create with it almost an infinite number of new forms of packaging. They have every possible characteristic which packaging men have desired and development still goes on. New plastics having numerous cost function relationships are being created at present, faster than even the packaging men could learn all about them.
Technical experts are consequently engaged in a ceaseless quest for materials and forms that are best suited for the desired packaging results from both functional and economic standpoint.
Packaging engineer is the expert conducting this search with the assistance of chemical engineers, structural designers and quality control and purchasing specialists. Packaging groups or research departments of companies, where biologicals or food products are involved, work closely with bacteriologists, chemists and food technologists because the latter also make application of their technology in packaging programmes.
Some companies have assigned a high status to their packaging function and a Production Manager is placed at the head of the packaging department though a relatively small group of professional workers spend their full time to work out various related problems.
Employment Avenues
With more and more companies recognising the important role played by such technologies in the success of the companies, the career is expanding in financial terms. Young graduates in engineering or science with on the job training in packaging are now taking big strides in the career. Some of them have even advanced to position of packaging management. Packaging men can just pick up their job in any location in areas related to packaging machinery, quality control, printing and allied arts etc. Since there are not enough technical institutes to provide training, the best way is to study separately the three facets of marketing, machines and materials in order to analyse how best can men with education in different fields become a part of the packaging scene.
Oppotunities exist for technologists and engineers to cater to the various segments in the industry :
* Flexible packaging
* Rigid plastic packaging
* Wooden case packaging
* Glass containers
* Aluminium & Tin cans
* Paper & Paper board
* Corrugated packing
* Textiles
* Jute
