Iggesund outlines action to improve service

Iggesund said that, like most other paperboard manufacturers, it and its customers had suffered from delivery times that have varied considerably.

A logistics team has been working for a couple of years to gradually improve the situation and just over six months ago Iggesund launched a greatly modernized support system that forms the foundation for its improved delivery service, now being launched under the name Care by Iggesund.

Iggesund’s delivery services range from overnight options from dedicated customer stocks to regular deliveries from the mill, with several more options in between. Further development will occur over the next 12 months.

Other features of the service offering are the fast, easy ordering of samples and materials, the provision of product safety information and certificates, and access to the analytical services of Iggesund’s accredited Laboratory for Chemical and Sensory Analyses. Iggesund’s extensive environmental documentation is also part of the service, not least as a guarantee that customers will have no unpleasant surprises about the origin of their forest raw material.

Further, Iggesund’s service offering encompasses everything linked to the products Invercote and Incada, from technical support in local markets to the paperboard expertise the company offers with its range of reference materials.

Arvid Sundblad (pictured), vice-president of sales and marketing at Iggesund, said: ‘Our service exists so that customers can get the most out of Invercote and Incada.

‘Having a capacity utilization rate of almost 95 percent makes you very sensitive to fluctuations in demand, especially when that demand increases. In the past we’ve had a number of such experiences and we don’t want either ourselves or our customers to go through that again.

‘The change of systems was so radical that it was about the same as doing a heart-lung transplant plus a full body blood transfusion in a human being. This reorganization has created the conditions for us to start moving towards constant delivery times but that will take time.’

Sundblad added: ‘We don’t just want customers to buy our paperboard. It’s important to us that they also get the most out of it. All our documentation and our teams of locally based technicians with their experience of projects and processes similar to our customers’ exist to make sure that happens.

‘We’ve offered some of this support for a long time but we haven’t made it clear enough to the majority of our customers that this service is available.’