My Tour with a Multinational Packaging Company

By: Buck

Prompt #8

            This past Thursday I was able to take a trip to Manchester, Michigan along with twelve other members of Michigan State’s Coalition of Packaging Professionals and Academic Connections(CoPPAC). Here we visited Amcor, a large international packaging company, and we were given a fully sponsored company tour of their Manchester branch. This was my first experience visiting a packaging company and getting an idea of what my future career could potentially look like. Since it was my first time doing something like this, I took a lot away from it and gained a lot of real world experience about the field of packaging.

Picture Credit: amcor.com

            To start, I think giving an idea of what Amcor does would be helpful. Amcor is an Australian-based packaging company that works with both rigid and flexible plastics (Amcor, 2016). They have branches that work with companies in designing a new package and branches that create these designed packages with unique molds for the company. A large number of big brand companies have worked with Amcor, and they have built up a multinational name for themselves. 

            The interesting thing about the Manchester branch is that it is Amcor’s only branch that has both sides of the production under one roof. That means that the engineers and R&D employees are working in the same building as the factory that is creating the bottles that they are designing on computers. This allowed us to see the full process of how a company works with Amcor. It starts with the company approaching Amcor with a list an idea of what they want a package to say for its product. The company will work with Amcor’s graphic designers and R&D employees to create a virtual sketch of what their package might look like. Next, this computer generated design is tested through other software that will put the bottle through virtual test simulations that are similar to what physical bottles go through. This step is to make sure that the design that has been created is possible to mass produce. Next, Amcor uses 3D printing to develop a few physical models that can be shown to the company to ensure that this is what the company desires. Then, custom molds are made and the production of the actual bottle begins in Amcor’s factories using both injection and air pressure molding methods. 

Being able to see this whole process and where a packaging engineer fits into each step was extremely helpful in getting an idea of my future. This experience has increased my excitement as I get to see how my life in packaging will unwrap. I think that working for a packaging company like Amcor would be an amazing opportunity to further my knowledge and experience in the packaging world. This hand-on experience has taught me that pursuing packaging doesn’t necessarily mean that once I am done with my degree that I will stop learning and only use what I learned at school. In the elastic world of packaging, the learning never fully stops, and every day you deal with new problems that require unique and creative solutions. 

Sources

Amcor - Investor Relations - Financial Information and ASX Announcements. N.p., 2016. Web.