The US$0.57 million DHL Asia Pacific Packaging Centre is the first of its kind in Asia Pacific, and the company plans to establish up to six more centres in the region by 2012.
Packaging services currently account for 25% of the contract logistics market in Asia-Pacific, and DHL Supply Chain Asia-Pacific expects to see this business grow by 15% year-on-year over the next three years.
According to Paul Graham, CEO of DHL Supply Chain Asia Pacific, only around 30% of companies outsource their secondary packaging activities to logistics providers, compared with more than 75% for warehousing services. "In the current economic climate, we find more companies looking to outsource their packaging operations," he said.
The DHL Asia Pacific Packaging Centre houses four packaging rooms - two dedicated GMP-compliant and two multi-user GMP-compliant - and twenty packing lines that can handle sixty million pieces per year.
Designing separate rooms and assigning dedicated teams in the facility for different products allows complete confidentiality for each customer. All finished products are concealed with dark opaque shrink-wrap materials and sent directly to customers' designated distribution centres within 48 hours.
Customers can check on the status of their goods via an in-house packaging productivity monitoring system, giving them full real-time visibility into what percentage of their goods have been packaged, enabling them to precisely plan their promotion launch dates.
