Siegwerk has introduced Brand Owner Collaboration (BOC), a new department working to connect the packaging supply chain and, ‘explore improvement and innovation opportunities with brand owners.’

BOC combines all of the company’s competence and skills in one with the goal to explore improvement and innovation opportunities with brand owners. It has been established to add value by generating cost-savings for potential reinvestments into innovation, noted Siegwerk, through new performance specifications and/or enhancing current packaging options with new features or innovative design.

By creating a triangular relationship with converters and brand owners, Siegwerk identified an opportunity to better understand the market needs and to identify relevant topics enabling the company to shape the future of packaging by channeling its R&D activities into the market segments of the future.

Through a direct collaboration with Siegwerk, brand owners in return benefit from Siegwerk’s overarching technical knowledge and conceptual skills with regard to all different kind of packaging applications. As the BOC team works across the company, it is uniquely set up to spearhead faster response times and the sharing of cross-application information.

Belal Habib, BCO global head, said, ‘We don’t see packaging as a technology, we see it as a business model, therefore we consider the entire value chain by default, targeting specific areas that unlock value for the broader chain.

‘When focusing on performance specifications for packaging to enable less restrictive material choices, significant technical but also conceptual skills are required to generate tangible results that can be applied to both innovation and value generation. And this is the exact support our BOC team can offer.’

As well as concreting on brand owner requests correlating with Siegwerk’s ink expertise, the BOC team can also help in case of overarching requests of strategic relevance, such as those related to the circular economy.

Mr Habib explained, ‘Our pan-Siegwerk lens enables us to join the dots between external obligations, application-specific requirements and the brand owners’ individual needs and spot opportunities for improvement that could impact either us as ink provider, the converter and/ or brand owner or the entire relationship.’