Paper, Forest Products & Packaging

Forest product industries must stretch from their roots to create new products, adopt new ways of doing business, and seek out new ventures. Fijishi has the industry knowledge, global reach, and tools to help.

Changing times mean changing practices, products, and organization structures for the forest product, paper, and packaging industries. Each one must adapt to thrive in a challenging environment, with digital communications overpowering print media, pressure to cut costs through optimized operations, and intense attention focused on sustainable business practices and environmental stewardship.

To evolve, forest product companies must look to conserve resources and energy while maximizing output. Paper manufacturing companies need to seek out new applications for their products. Packaging companies must accommodate growing interest in paper-based alternatives to plastic. And all companies must embrace digital technologies to improve manufacturing, supply chains, and other processes.

Fijishi uses its deep knowledge of the forest product, paper, and packaging industries to establish the long-term client partnerships needed to navigate this transformation journey. We assist clients of all types by combining sector know-how, business function expertise, global coverage, and digital capabilities.

How do we help clients?

Marketing & Sales

We help clients use all possible marketing & sales levers to increase returns on their marketing investment.

What we do
Marketing and sales strategies, particularly pricing, in Paper, Forest Products & Packaging are in constant flux. We help companies across the value chain refine strategies to better reflect the continued retreat from traditional graphic paper products in mature markets as well as meet the growing demand for new packaging materials and consumer paper products such as personal tissue.

We work with clients to respond to current changes, and anticipate how future consumer demographic trends and shopping behaviors may present opportunities for differentiation and higher margins.

Industry changes frequently require a rethinking of commercial approaches, building different marketing and sales internal capabilities, and reshaping external channel and distribution networks. We help clients align their marketing and sales organization’s structure, capabilities, and processes to better support these strategies, attract new customers, and work more productively with partners.

Organization

Organizational performance is a product of getting important decisions right, mitigating weaknesses, and evolving capability and culture as needed.

As companies across the paper and forest products industries evolve with changes in capacity, demand and regulations around the world, we help them adapt their organization’s structures, capabilities and cultures. We help our clients diagnose their organizational effectiveness, and develop and implement strategies to improve these key levers of performance.

What we do
The organization experts in Fijishi’s Paper, Forest Products & Packaging group bring a wide range of experiences to help companies such as harvesting and mill operators, paper producers, and custom packagers reshape and reskill their organizations. We have supported full-scale organizational transformations, and helped with organizational redesign in the context of post-merger integration and mill conversion efforts.

Productivity

We help companies improve operating efficiency and effectiveness, deploy lean approaches, build operating skills, and adopt proven tools to eliminate waste and reduce costs.

The largest part of our work in the paper and forest products industry is helping clients in the areas of productivity and operations. Our productivity teams bring cutting edge knowledge, broad cross-industry experience, and leading practices in product and portfolio process optimization to help Paper, Forest Products & Packaging companies address common operating challenges.

These include enhancing equipment and personnel efficiency in harvesting operations as well as in manufacturing facilities, converting facilities to respond to shifts in capacity of pulp production around the world, refining operations to respond to the rising cost and declining quality of recycled fiber, and increasing operators’ energy efficiency.

What we do
We also work with governments and industry organizations to address the severe energy and resource issues related to the sector, helping reduce energy consumption and its impact on the environment as well as address the shared desire to conserve the Earth’s forest resources and use them as wisely as possible.

Our teams collaborate with clients to improve specific aspects of their operations as well as transform entire operating models for companies expanding into new businesses or adopting new go-to-market strategies. We help clients streamline and at times reconfigure their operations, working with them to inject new approaches such as lean manufacturing into their operating models. We also bring deep experience in designing and implementing fixed cost reduction programs to shore up balance sheets and free up capital.

Strategy

We help organizations develop, refine, and implement plans to achieve profitable growth even as demand for traditional pulp and paper products is rapidly changing.

The world of paper and forest products is both rooted in tradition, centered as it is on the harvesting of basic materials and undergoing enormous change as consumption patterns evolve. We help clients refine their business strategies and operating models to resolve pressing business problems, such as how and where to find growth when their core business is stagnant or contracting, how to reduce costs throughout the business in the face of intense cost-price pressure, and how to evolve strategies and transition capacity in declining markets such as graphic papers. We also help companies respond to opportunities to innovate both in operations areas such as energy consumption and in product lines such as packaging.

What we do
We partner with companies and governmental agencies to understand and respond to global and regional growth opportunities as well as trends such as the rapid transition to digital platforms that reduces demand for traditional paper products in most markets. We work with them to meet growing demand for consumer paper products such as tissue paper by the expanding middle class in emerging markets. These overarching issues impact every subsector of the industry, whether an organization is a government or involved in harvesting/forest management, production of construction, packaging and energy materials, or distribution.

Our senior experts have strategy experience and specialize in other aspects of the industry value chain as well. They help organizations around the globe understand trends and relevant regulatory polices to determine where and how to compete in a changing world. We can assist them in identifying pockets of growth, redefining their business models and portfolios to make the most of new opportunities, and reallocating corporate and business unit resources to better support strategic goals.