Operational excellence: Driving customer value at adapa
Across industries, the best companies share a secret: they are never satisfied with the status quo. Driving everyday improvements is how we stay ahead. Operational Excellence in packaging matters because it makes us more resilient, innovative, and customer focused. It is not just about cost or efficiency, but also about continuously finding better ways to deliver greater value to you in quality, reliability, speed, and service.
Our vision and approach
We launched our continuous improvement journey with a clear vision encapsulated by our motto: “Find a better way. Every one, every day.” This phrase underscores that every single one of us, at every level, is empowered and expected to contribute to making things better daily. No improvement is too small.
Our adapa OpEx roadmap is a multi-year plan guiding us from establishing the basics to ultimately embedding a self-sustaining improvement culture by 2029. Our approach combines:
- Purpose: We align each year’s initiatives to a larger goal, such as better customer service or sustainability.
- People: We invest heavily in our skills and mindset through Lean training for employees and the recognition of improvement contributions.
- Process: We implement structured processes, common standards, and daily management routines to make improvement systematic.
A culture of daily improvement
Our adapa OpEx journey is not a one-off project; it is how we work every day. We are establishing common daily practices across all our sites and teams, from short morning stand-up meetings to visual performance boards, so that everyone knows the priorities and can spot issues or ideas quickly.
Problems are seen as opportunities. When something goes wrong or a target is missed, we use it as a chance to ask why and fix the root cause, not to place blame. By standardising key processes, we ensure that best practices are shared and adopted company-wide, making our operational performance at adapa more consistent and enabling faster scaling of improvements.
Continuous improvement is part of everyone’s job description, supported by leadership coaching teams rather than just giving orders. This inclusive, structured approach draws inspiration from world-class systems, but we’ve made it our own: our way of excellence.
Customer-centric manufacturing outcomes
The ultimate goal of our business excellence in manufacturing is to benefit our partners. Every efficiency we gain, every defect we eliminate, and every streamlined workflow translates into customer-centric manufacturing outcomes that you notice.
- Reliability: By reducing process waste and variation, we have been able to achieve improving on-time delivery performance, meaning you get your products more reliably when you need them.
- Quality: Quality improvements driven by OpEx ensure that you receive consistent packaging quality, strengthening your trust in us.
- Sustainability: Sustainable operational performance has pushed us on innovation. Our teams have found ways to reduce packaging waste and energy usage while maintaining performance, contributing directly to your own sustainability goals. Read more in our 2025 Sustainability Report.
Looking ahead
Our continuous improvement journey is ongoing. Just as the industry never stands still, we will keep refining our processes and developing our people.
Through this mindset, we deliver innovation that fits, adapts and endures.
