E-Week Video: Haskell’s Packaging Design Team Help Manufacturers Adjust to Supply Chain Disruptions

Editor’s note: Haskell is proud to join its more than 650 design professionals in celebrating Engineers Week. Founded in 1951 by the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE), Engineers Week brings together a formal coalition of more than 70 engineering, educational, and cultural societies, as well as more than 50 corporations and government agencies, to ensure a diverse and well-educated future engineering workforce by increasing awareness of and interest in engineering and technology careers. This year’s theme is “Imagining Tomorrow,” which we commemorate by putting our young engineers and innovation front and center.

For consumers, empty store shelves have been an emblematic and enduring image of the coronavirus pandemic. For manufacturers, those empty shelves were the result of massive supply chain disruptions.

As experts in the packaging and handling of consumer packaged goods, Haskell’s engineers have been a reliable resource to their manufacturing clients as they have worked to overcome such difficulties.

“We saw with the coronavirus when there was any sort of blip in the supply chain, you had totally derailed the whole train,” Haskell Senior Integrator Ginna Williamson said. “In the short term, that's what leaves the shelves empty. The way that we can help our customers navigate that is by helping them evaluate their material-handling and distribution systems and determine options for flexibility.”

In the associated video, Williamson and Bela Jacobson, Haskell Director of Packaging, address short-term solutions and look at approaches and capital equipment considerations for a longer-term perspective.

Atlanta became one of Haskell’s first regional offices in 2010 when it acquired its packaging arm, formerly E2M, which dates to 1985. Haskell’s Packaging Systems and Material Handling divisions once based in Atlanta, have now grown to support customers out of five different Haskell regional offices. Now Atlanta not only features a portion of the packaging team, but also features a full complement of Mechanical, Controls, Electrical, and Industrial Engineers as well as Project Management/Construction resources.