GUEST BLOG: Solving Specification Chaos in the Packaging Industry
Posted on March 14, 2016 09:11 AM by WGCIT
The greatest inventions are created to solve a need. The need may be obvious, or it may be a latent need. For Matthew Wright, president and co-Founder of specright, the need for a specification management service was obvious. After 20 years of working in the packaging industry, he saw how specification chaos was costing companies both time and money. His solution was to create a company that utilized “the cloud” and quality engineers to help companies to take control of their specifications.
By Matthew Wright
Specright President and Co-Founder
Founded in 2014, specright is a young company that is constantly evolving. While we are headquartered in Irvine, CA, our engineering office is located in San Luis Obispo. Specright has strategically partnered with Cal Poly’s packaging program, allowing us to employ their packaging students in both part-time and full-time positions. Specright now offers an internship program for current Cal Poly packaging students. Our partnership with the Cal Poly packaging program also allows specright to provide basic package performance testing for our clients.
Although our background and expertise is in packaging, we have expanded our services and platform to accommodate product specifications over the past year. We have created specifications for many food and drink items, including wine, produce, and even pet food. No matter the company or industry, our universal platform can accommodate any data. In the future, we plan to expand our specification data base to include more specialized packaging commodities and other products.
While the specright solution is rooted in data housing and normalizing for packaging and products, we have made product development our top priority. In 2016 we introduced our Packaging IQ, a solution that proactively identifies consolidation and optimization opportunities. Once our engineers have loaded your data onto our platform, Packaging IQ automatically diagnosis these insights. Simple changes such as size consolidation, flute downgrade, and material combination optimization can save companies a significant amount of money. Over the next year we hope to make Packaging IQ smarter and more intuitive.
When specright was first created, we were fortunate enough to have a core group of customers—many of them being agriculture companies. After working with various produce growers and packers we decided to join the WGA. Our membership has provided us with the resources to better serve our produce customers, and introduced us to the world of AgTech. We have seen the value of AgTech firsthand, and have become as involved as possible over the past year. We recently opened on office in Salinas at the Western Growers Center for Innovation & Technology in order to be closer to our clients and gain access to valuable industry insight. We are very excited to see where this partnership takes us, and to be a significant player in the future of AgTech.