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EnCore Contract Packaging

Expand Your Business With Contract Packaging

Corrugated manufacturers are delivering more than the products they make now – offering value-added contract packaging and fulfillment services transforms customer relationships from transactional to strategic. Handling customer-supplied inventory, packing out consumer-ready and retail solutions, and shipping to multiple locations enables packaging companies to add a significant revenue stream without spending anything on new corrugating or converting equipment. EnCore Contract Packaging unlocks fulfillment at full speed.

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Add Value to Customers, Remove Barriers from Operations

  • Gain centralized visibility across hand assembly, packout work, labor demand, component inventory, quarantine status, and production progress — helping reduce siloed tracking, improve warehouse space utilization, and unlock more output from existing resources.
  • Manage crew readiness, component availability, staging, line bins, finished goods movement, and real-time issue alerts inside a unified ecosystem — helping teams spend less time chasing updates and more time keeping contract packaging jobs on schedule.
  • Plan converting and hand assembly in the same scheduling environment, with visibility into available sets, component shortages, crew size, labor capacity, and schedule impact — reducing manual planning effort, minimizing inventory buffers, and improving confidence that jobs can run as scheduled.
  • Support complex contract packaging and multi-store fulfillment orders with better component visibility, flexible order-line Ship To assignments, and fewer manual workarounds — helping them provide faster delivery updates and reduce time spent canceling, recreating, or manually tracking orders.

Key Capabilities of EnCore Contract Packaging

Component, Customer-Supplied Inventory, and MRP Visibility

Clear insight into parent-item availability, available sets, component-level inventory, customer-supplied materials, scheduled component consumption, quarantine quantities, and the material impact of assembly plans.

Inventory and Bin Control

Prevent assembly lines from being starved or overcrowded with staging, line, dock, and finished goods bin areas tied to assembled jobs.

Quarantine and Quality Control

Quarantine individual inventory tickets at the customer, vendor, or item level to prevent restricted materials from being shipped, staged, moved to production, or loaded until released.

Unified Converting and Assembly Scheduling

Schedule converting, hand assembly, and packout with crew size, labor capacity and component availability from the same planning optimization solution that automates 80% of converting jobs.

Digital Production Reporting

Replace spreadsheets and their associated mistakes and delays with a purpose-built production reporting interface for hand assembly operations.

Real-Time Issue Alerts

Enable operators to ask for assistance without leaving their area - notify supervisors about tooling issues, stock outages, overruns, and underruns directly from the production interface.

Reconciliation and Line Clearance

Supervisor-level review, approval, and clearing of hand assembly line reconciliation, including quantity-on-hand visibility controls and flexible options for clearing selected tickets.

Lot Traceability and Recall Support

Track lot numbers and expiration dates through the assembly process, with improved lot trace reporting to help identify component lots quickly in recall scenarios.

Automated Job Approval Logic

Apply approval codes to orders based on spec, product structure, and component configuration, helping ensure the right review steps are triggered for complex assemblies, customer requirements, or controlled materials.

Multi-Store and Multi-Destination Fulfillment

Assign different Ship To locations on individual order lines to support retail, club store, e-commerce, and distribution programs that require one contract packaging order to be fulfilled across multiple destinations.

FAQ

What is contract packaging for corrugated manufacturers?

Contract packaging — often called co-pack, packout, fulfillment, kitting, hand assembly, or value-added packaging — is the process of assembling, packing, labeling, bundling, or preparing customer products for shipment using corrugated materials, customer-supplied inventory, and other packaging components. For corrugated manufacturers, it expands the plant’s role beyond producing boxes, displays, or sheets into managing the full packaging and fulfillment workflow — including component inventory, labor planning, quality control, lot traceability, finished goods reporting, and multi-destination shipment preparation.

Contract packaging is challenging because it brings together manufactured corrugated materials, customer-supplied inventory, purchased components, labor planning, line setup, quality checks, lot traceability, packout requirements, and fulfillment deadlines into one connected workflow. Many companies underestimate the operational complexity behind the work. They may treat contract packaging like a manual add-on, when in reality it requires tight control over component availability, crew capacity, staging, line replenishment, quarantine status, finished goods movement, and production reporting.

EnCore Contract Packaging helps corrugated manufacturers manage fulfillment as a controlled production process instead of an offline manual workflow. It connects order entry, component inventory, customer-supplied materials, MRP, scheduling, labor capacity, bin movement, production reporting, lot traceability, quarantine control, alerts, and finished goods reconciliation inside EnCore. By reducing spreadsheet tracking, last-minute material surprises, line delays, excess inventory buffers, and manual coordination, plants can run contract packaging work more predictably, protect quality, improve delivery performance, and turn co-pack, packout, and fulfillment services into a repeatable source of margin.

Assembled products typically refer to corrugated items that require additional setup, hand assembly, or multiple components before they become finished goods, such as displays, kits, partitions, or multi-part packaging. Contract packaging is broader. It often includes assembling the corrugated product, packing customer-supplied goods into it, managing components or lots, preparing finished packs for shipment, and supporting co-pack, packout, fulfillment, kitting, labeling, or multi-destination distribution programs. Handling customer-supplied goods typically requires much stronger traceability and quarantine practices compared to handling corrugated and adjacent packaging materials. As a significant source of demand for contract packaging comes from retail, the goods being supplied to be packed can be very seasonal. This introduces additional complexity around hiring temporary workers to scale up for busy seasons surrounding holidays, events, and perishable food supply.

Expand Your Packaging Services

Turn contract packaging and fulfillment into a new revenue stream without investing in additional converting equipment. EnCore helps you manage customer-supplied inventory, fulfillment, packing, and shipping from one connected system.

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