By Danna Nelson, SVP of Product, Amtech Software

A few months ago, I was on a call with an operations manager at a corrugated plant. They’d been a customer for years, good operation, growing. They were expanding into contract packaging: retail pack out programs, customer-supplied materials, fulfillment for a handful of consumer goods accounts.

I asked how they were managing it.

“Spreadsheets,” they said. “And a lot of phone calls.”

They described a workflow that touched their EnCore inventory, their converting schedule, their warehouse floor, their quality team, and their shipping dock and almost none of it was connected. Every hand-off was manual. Every status update required someone to either ask or guess. And when something went wrong, a component shortage, a line count that didn’t reconcile, a customer asking for lot traceability on materials they’d supplied, the work to resolve it was enormous.

I heard versions of that conversation more times than I can count. Different plants, different programs, different degrees of scale. Same underlying problem.

There’s a business reason this is happening now, and it’s worth being direct about it.

Board costs are rising. When your primary margin comes from converting raw materials, rising input costs are a direct threat. The manufacturers we talk to aren’t sitting still. They’re asking: what else can we offer that requires our expertise but doesn’t live and die on the price of containerboard?

Assembled products and contract packaging are a big part of that answer. Kits, displays, retail-ready programs, fulfillment services, these are higher-touch offerings that a corrugated plant is well-positioned to provide. They deepen customer relationships, diversify revenue, and hold margin better than converting alone under cost pressure.

The problem isn’t the opportunity. The problem is the tooling.

Most packaging ERP systems were built around conventional converting workflows. They weren’t designed for managing crew-based hand assembly lines, tracking customer-supplied components through a pack out workflow, or reconciling finished goods against component consumption. So the work ends up in spreadsheets, disconnected from the system the rest of the plant runs on. That gap has real costs: coordination delays, inventory buffers that exist because nobody’s sure what’s available, and problems nobody saw coming until they were already behind.

Amtech decided to close it.

EnCore Assembled Products and EnCore Contract Packaging, both launching today, are purpose-built for corrugated manufacturers running these operations. Not adapted from a 3PL platform. Built from scratch, based on what we heard from customers who were already doing this work and showed us exactly how it operated.

EnCore Assembled Products covers the core of hand assembly: component material planning, digital production reporting, line bin and staging control, real-time issue alerts from the floor, and unified scheduling of converting and assembly jobs through the Advanced Planning Board, crew size, labor capacity, component availability, all from one place.

EnCore Contract Packaging extends those capabilities into co-pack and fulfillment complexity: customer-supplied inventory management, quarantine and quality controls, lot traceability, line reconciliation, and multi-destination fulfillment for programs that ship to multiple locations from a single order.

These solutions are shaped by the people running the work, and we’ll continue to invest in the capabilities to help our customers protect their margins and run a profitable plant.

What does it mean for customers?

If your plant is already doing hand assembly or contract packaging, you can bring that work inside EnCore instead of managing it in parallel. Your schedulers can plan converting and assembly together. Your CSRs get better component visibility. Your production managers can see job progress without chasing someone for a count. And when something goes wrong, your team gets an alert instead of a surprise.

If you’re thinking about expanding into value-added services, if customers are asking for displays, kits, or pack out programs and you’ve been hesitant because the operations felt unmanageable, there’s now a system designed to help you run it.

We’re hosting a webinar on July 9th, “Level-Up Your Premium Products and Value-Added Services When Material Costs Rise” if you want to see it in action.

Register Here.