Comment
a customer switches a line from plastic to fibre and needs a grease or moisture barrier, a partner makes sure it still folds cleanly.
THE RIGHT PLACE FOR A HARD TENDER This is not an argument against buying well. Procurement discipline has saved converters real money, and driving a hard bargain on stable, predictable volume is exactly right. When a supplier hides behind the word “partnership” to avoid talking about cost, procurement is right to be sceptical. The discipline is sound, but the question is where you apply it.
Long, predictable grades belong on a tight tender, squeezed on price without apology. The problem comes with everything else. This includes the urgent job, the short run, the contingency order and the overflow when a converter’s own line is full. That less predictable work is growing faster than the steady core, and a tender has no way to score the supplier who can flex and adapt. The system was built to compare cost per tonne, and it does that well while missing everything around it.
Every supplier website has a line about partnership. It costs nothing to write and even
less to mean. You fi nd out whether any of it is real on the bad days, where the mill lead time has slipped, the customer has changed the brief, a line is down, and the order still has to ship. Ultimately, that is the only ‘partnership’ test that counts. So maybe it is worth asking the industry to be harder about the word. Partnership is not a token value on a slide. It is what a supplier does in the week everything goes wrong.
If more converters bought on that basis, and more suppliers were willing to be judged on it, the word might start meaning something again
www.convertermag.com
September 2026
35
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42
