Packaging Horizons is a manufacturer of tamper-evident security bags based in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. Since 1984, the company has been at the forefront of product development, innovative materials use, and novel applications for plastics-based security bags that find end use in the financial, security, medical, and similar industries.
“Regardless of the size of the company, no one has the in-house staff to execute a study like this. The amount of expertise RTI can call on is phenomenal.”
“Possibly the most beneficial result was the confirmation that several areas we believed to be opportunities were not applicable after all. We would have spent resources trying to roll out there to no avail.”
John Gregor
Vice President/General Manager
Situation
Packaging Horizons has long been an innovator and early adopter of flexible packaging technology, and the company was one of the first to assist the financial sector in its transition from bulky, canvas lock-and-key bags to puncture-resistant plastic security bags. Part of its natural product development evolution took the company into chain-of-custody bags for evidence, medication, personal property, etc. Believing that it had exhausted many of the materials-related improvements available to them, Packaging Horizons looked for a technology-based solution to the problem of human error when logging vital bag information.
TDMI Solution
The company turned to Manufacturers Resource Center (MRC), a NIST MEP affiliate, on a TDMI project to explore Near Field Communications (NFC) as a potential source of information transfer to eliminate problems associated with human entry of bag/contents data. Specifically, with the NFC product selected and a proven method for affixing the NFC transmitter to the security bag, Packaging Horizons needed to gain a clear understanding of the end-use markets available for the new product.
Results
- Avoided more than $75,000 in cost—and one year of time—by engaging RTI to conduct the research vs. using in-house resources
- Identified new markets that will be open to early adoption of NFC-based products
- Alternatively, also identified industries/applications with entrenched alternatives that will not present viable opportunities
- Confirmed the effectiveness of their proposed value proposition after conversations with live prospects in target industries
- MRC/RTI executed the full market study in just three months in order to facilitate rollout