What happens when you ask 65 suppliers for packaging data

Most packaging platforms are all about the dashboard. In this post, we'll explain the work that makes that data useful.

That work always begins with supplier outreach.

The familiar slog of tracking down packaging information from the myriad companies that hold it, then turning it into something the business can trust and use.

It is unglamorous, repetitive work. It also determines how useful everything downstream will be.

We recently closed two supplier outreach rounds on the same day (August 15), for two very different customers. One was a beauty retailer with a concentrated supplier base in Asia. The other was an industrial packaging distributor working with a long tail of Australian and offshore manufacturers.

Together, 65 supplier organisations were in scope. Here is how the two rounds unfolded, including where suppliers engaged, where they did not, and what we learned.

The cadence is the product

Both rounds followed the same sequence, from the initial login email through to the final notice and data lock:

• Early June - Initial outreach. Suppliers received platform login details and instructions to review, refine and validate their prepared packaging records.
• Seven days later - Direct follow-up. Every supplier who had not logged in received a follow-up.
• Every three days - Automated reminders. Reminders continued for suppliers who had not signed in and those who had signed in but were yet to validate anything.
• Early August - Final notice. Suppliers were advised that the outreach window was about to close.
• 15 August - Round closed. The outreach ended, and the data was consolidated and locked.

Over ten weeks, a non-responding supplier could receive roughly 20 automated touchpoints. Across 65 suppliers, that is a level of follow-up few internal teams could sustain.

The customer did not need to make escalation calls or ask a packaging manager to spend August chasing replies. Automation kept the process moving well beyond the point where most manual outreach starts to slow.

Sign-in is a vanity metric that hides the bigger story

Of the 65 suppliers, 40 signed in.

For the beauty retailer, that was 20 of 26 suppliers. For the industrial packaging distributor, it was 20 of 39: a 51% sign-in rate across a supplier base that included a long tail of small manufacturers.

But sign-in is only the first measure. On its own, it tells you very little about whether the data improved.

Four suppliers signed in and did nothing. They accessed the platform but did not open a single product record. Another 25 never signed in, despite receiving the invitation and remaining on the reminder cadence for ten weeks.

We reported both groups to the customer by name at handover.

This is an important distinction. A supplier who has ignored roughly 20 reminders is unlikely to be won over by reminder number 21. At that point, it is a commercial relationship question for the customer's procurement team… not a data collection problem.

What supplier engagement looked like

The remaining 36 supplier accounts opened records and got to work.

Between them, they generated:

• 2,214 product review events
• 397 SKUs opened
• 1,029 component-level updates

Those numbers were heavily skewed.

Two suppliers in the industrial round reviewed 143 and 129 SKUs respectively, generating several hundred review events without raising a single structural dispute about how their packaging had been modelled.

At the other end, 12 suppliers reviewed between one and four SKUs each.

That spread is normal. Suppliers that are ready to engage at scale tend to move quickly and need very little help. The tail is where regular, automated follow-up matters most.

The component updates are where the data itself improved. Suppliers made 1,029 changes to material and mass details across the two rounds. These were not corrections sent back in a spreadsheet. They were refinements made directly to structured packaging records by the companies that manufacture the items.

Support load: 26 tickets, all closed

Across 65 suppliers over ten weeks, the two programs generated 26 support tickets. All 26 were resolved. None are open.

The breakdown was:

• Login assistance: 8
• Queries requiring no action: 9
• Platform walkthroughs: 5
• Onboarding emails resent: 2
• Data change requests: 1
• User access: 1

In the end, a clear pattern emerged. Almost none of the support requests were about packaging. Most were about getting access to the platform or understanding what to do next.

And here's the kicker: The customer did not receive a single one of those support emails.

Phantm handled the full support load. In a manual outreach round of this size, the packaging or sustainability lead could expect hundreds of emails covering follow-up, clarification and access. Here, none of that came close to their inbox.

The finding has also given us a clear product direction. We will share more about what it changed in the next post.

Completion, reported honestly

At close, in the beauty program 30 SKUs were fully complete — BOM and every packaging tier confirmed — with primary packaging, the mandatory requirement, complete on 95 records.

In the industrial program, 14 SKUs came through the full review-and-approve loop end to end.

That is 44 fully complete SKUs against 397 opened. The completion number is smaller than we would like, and we would rather publish it plainly in the interests of full transparency.

What they represent is the first proof that the whole pathway works: a pre-modelled scenario, opened by the supplier, refined at component level, confirmed, and approved. One supplier validated 10 SKUs of carton and strapping scenarios end to end. Another confirmed four tape-in-carton structures exactly as modelled.

The gap between 397 opened and 44 fully complete is a product problem and measurable, which means it is fixable.

We measured it, and we are fixing it.

Why the round is worth running again

A structured outreach round produces something different:

1. The validated data is consolidated and locked into a packaging library that persists.
2. Future SKUs move to a low-frequency monthly onboarding cadence aligned with product release schedules, with a handful of new items per month rather than a bulk ingestion every 12 months.

That is the difference between a data collection exercise and a data asset. The exercise ends, the asset compounds, and the second round is materially cheaper than the first because the structures already exist and only the changes need to be confirmed.

Capture once, repurpose forever is more than a slogan about reporting. It always starts in the first mile, with a supplier logging in and confirming the mass of a component.

Planning a supplier data round?

Phantm builds the packaging data infrastructure behind reporting, procurement and compliance. If you are planning a supplier data program, we are happy to walk you through what a round looks like in practice.