Used the world over to protect, move, and store a multitude of products, packaging comes in a multitude of materials – corrugated containerboard, boxboard, folding paperboard, aluminum foil, foamed plastics, bubble wrap, and even glass. And although common packaging bears the distinction as one of the world's most-used commodity products, packaging products are hardly common. Each is unique in material, size, construction, color, and labeling.

But as every packaging producer knows, a truly common thread in commodity-driven businesses is the pressure to increase profit margins by increasing product production, sales, and distribution. Additional pressure to produce, sell, and distribute more product stems from industry consolidation through worldwide mergers and acquisitions, driving company supply chains to meet the demands of global as well as local customers.

Success in this environment takes controlling costs and increasing efficiencies in the way you make and move your products. And that means improving supply chain efficiencies to increase productivity and service while cutting costs.

SAP provides solutions designed specifically to help packaging companies optimize production and supply chains. Not only can SAP help your business overcome impediments that often stall optimization efforts – a complex, heterogeneous IT landscape built from a collection of legacy mill and manufacturing processes combined with homegrown and custom applications – but it offers solutions that target your industry's specific processes.

In particular, SAP solutions for packaging:

• Support powerful master-data modeling functions for uniquely describing the desired product its production method
• Run on the SAP NetWeaver platform, enabling your business to integrate packaging-specific Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) to ensure the execution of all packaging business processes