Insights from a series of in-depth interviews with sales operations leads, managing directors and SAP owners across the DACH packaging industry.
From a Swiss folding-carton site with 3,000 orders, through a mid-market manufacturer with 25,000, to an international pharma packaging specialist with 28,000 orders per year — five patterns surface in every single conversation.
What we looked at
Eight focus areas per conversation — from current-state process through inbound channels and volume to the ideal solution picture.
Findings
Regardless of company size, location or ERP system, the same five patterns repeat. If you work in the industry, at least three of them will sound very familiar.
Across every conversation, the share of orders arriving by email lands between 70% and well above. Phone still matters up to 25% in the SME mix, while EDI typically only covers a handful of major accounts.
Standard order, unchanged item: 5–10 min per line. With all checks, master data and filing: 10–20 min. More complex orders with version checks and price clarification: up to a full hour.
Whether folding cartons, pouches or roll stock: orders almost always fall into the same categories — unchanged reprint, revised version, new SKU and contract / call-off.
Customers order with their own material number, not the internal one. The same customer material number can even be reused across different customers — the actual work is mapping it onto the internal print image, plant and ship-to.
Three of the interviewed companies are currently in an ERP migration. In none of those projects is intelligent processing of inbound PDF orders part of the standard scope.
Aufwand per order
The effort figures from the interviews are remarkably consistent across all participants.
Use-case distribution
At the interviewed pharma converter, 14,000–15,000 of roughly 20,000 orders per year fall into the "unchanged reprint" use case — orders that can technically be processed almost "blindly" today.
Deep dive
Representative of a whole class of similar cases: an international folding-carton manufacturer with a strong pharma focus, whose process we walked through in three back-to-back sessions.
Target state — defined together
What we demonstrated technically
In the live demo we worked with real orders from day-to-day operations. Per data point — material number, delivery date, quantity, ship-to — individual thresholds can be configured so that critical fields never pass without human confirmation.
On the very first order in a given layout — measured on the field level, without a customer-specific model.
Once the layout has been seen two or three times — configurable with custom thresholds per data point.
Voices from the interviews
That would simply not be feasible from a resource standpoint. Processing is one thing — actually working through them is a second problem.
Comparing the material number — that is the indispensable data point. It is also the first check we run.
It cannot be the goal to bring even more typing work in. We want to focus on customer advice and communication.
What this means for others
If you found yourself nodding along — welcome to the club. Most packaging companies we speak with end up making three very similar decisions.
Not bolted onto the ERP programme. The leverage is too large and too specific for a standard module.
They typically carry 70–80% of volume. Edge cases are deferred on purpose.
Competitive pressure (including from Asia) comes from service, not from typing. The goal is quality and time with customers.
Download the 2026 study
Interviews, effort metrics, use-case distribution and a pharma deep dive — concise enough to read, share and bring to a team meeting.