Customers and
suppliers

Active stakeholder engagement

Frank communication and proactive cooperation help Vetropack to anticipate the needs of customers and other stakeholders and exploit business opportunities, enabling it to gain competitive advantages. The main stakeholder groups, which influence Vetropack’s business activity or are affected by it, include investors, customers, suppliers, employees and their representatives and society in general, including supervisory authorities, legislators, trade associations and non-government organisations (NGOs).

In the reporting year, communication with all stakeholder groups was particularly important due to the coronavirus. Vetropack contacted its customers and suppliers very early on and thus managed to make it through without any serious delivery disruption whatsoever, even during the lockdown period. This was essential for customers because, without packaging, they cannot bring their products to market. Vetropack is therefore an important cog in the system for many buyers and has proved that its position is resilient enough to fulfil this responsibility.

However, direct communication with customers and suppliers, for example at major trade fairs, was extremely limited in the year under review. Many events were cancelled or Vetropack decided not to attend for safety reasons. Nevertheless, the company significantly increased its virtual contact with customers and suppliers.

• Communication with employees: Performance Review, “Employee engagement”
• Working with suppliers: Performance Review, “Process innovation with suppliers” and “Multi-supplier strategy”
• Customer relationships: Performance Review, “Customer-specific products”
• Communication with other stakeholder groups: Sustainability Report, “Active stakeholder engagement”

Multi-supplier strategy

Vetropack pursues a multi-supplier strategy to guarantee a smooth production process. The strategy secures the supply of raw materials and equipment and minimises risks in the supply chain, such as disproportionate dependencies. The benefit of this approach became particularly apparent during the lockdown due to the pandemic in the reporting year.

In the year under review, Vetropack analysed the market and sought contact with new suppliers to make the supply chain more robust. This was the company’s response to the trend towards consolidation and concentration in the supply chain, especially amongst suppliers of equipment, and to the dramatic increase in demand for production equipment in the glass packaging industry. New potential suppliers must comply with the requirements of the Supplier Code.

The coronavirus pandemic also revealed how susceptible supply chains are to disruption in a globalised world. Business was affected by temporary shutdowns of individual production sites and severe restrictions on cross-border traffic made logistics difficult. Thanks to the multi-supplier strategy and good market links, Vetropack Group did not experience any serious shortages in its supply of raw materials and resources for production. The large number of active and pre-qualified freight forwarders in the supplier portfolio also guaranteed customer logistics at all times.

In the medium and long term, Vetropack Group is working even more closely with suppliers which supply products that are as environmentally sustainable as possible. With this direction, Vetropack is pursuing its goal of reducing the use of primary raw materials and fossil fuels, both in its own production process and in upstream production steps. It also aims to consume fewer synthetic raw materials. The procurement workshops on sustainable procurement scheduled for the reporting year could not be held due to the coronavirus pandemic and are expected to take place in 2021.

The aim is to minimise supply and price risks and to establish alternatives to strengthen Vetropack’s negotiating position.

Health and safety of customers and consumers

Its professional processing of the high-quality packaging material glass means that Vetropack protects not only the packaged drinks and foodstuffs but also consumers’ health. Quality and safety are essential factors that are taken into account for each product development in accordance with clearly defined criteria. The company checks each individual glass container.

Vetropack also invested in refining the quality control process for its products in 2020. The quality assurance work group is pressing ahead with the harmonisation of the quality assurance processes. Improving testing technology was another area of focus. For instance, amongst other changes, the latest versions of testing sets were installed to detect faulty glass containers even more reliably. The quality of the testing sets on all production lines was evaluated to serve as a basis for future investment decisions.

Vetropack established ensuring the highest quality standards as an important objective under the “Leader in quality” heading as part of its new Strategy 2030. Existing quality indicators, such as the number of complaints per glass container sold and critical defects identified internally, are used to measure progress. These quality indicators are not published for competition reasons.