Is anyone measuring packaging machine sales per capita?

I've always been a believer in managing by metrics. Is anyone looking at packaging machinery sales dollars per capita in a particular region of the world? If not, I think they should be.

You can't manage what you don't measure, but figuring out what to measure and how to measure it is a non-trivial task. In my corporate life, I depended upon monitoring metrics such as engineering hours per dollar of capital spending or chocolate consumption per capita. In my consulting business, I help companies determine what metrics will be best for them. It's almost always a set of metrics, not just one.

I'm usually not as interested in the absolute value of a metric, but in its trend over time. Looking at the first or second derivative is ofen more informative. As business circumstances change, the preferred direction of a metric or its derivative is not always the same. One metric may have increased meaning when looked at in relationship to another.

As I was listenting to representatives of Ipack-Ima describe the Italian packaging machinery market of 8 billion Euros per year in a region of 900 million consumers, it struck me that packaging machinery sales per capita could be a meaningful measure of how well the packaging machine industry is performing. As packagers introduce new packaging configurations to consumers, this number will go up. As consumers demand more packaged products, this number will go up. As packagers seek higher productivity, this number will go up. As a region matures in terms of its packaging economy, this number will go up. In aggegate, this number and its derivatives should indicate how fully penetrated a particular packaging machinery market is, how fast it is changing and whether the rate of change is on the increase or decrease.

In addition to providing guidance on overall industry performance, any manufacturer should be able to use this index to monitor their own performance versus that of the industry overall. Manufacturers should be able to use this metric to determine the regions with the highest potential for growth and to compare performance of business units in different parts of the world.

Is anyone using this metric? Is there value in monitoring it? If so, how are or could we do so? What other metrics are packaging machinery manufacturers finding to be useful? Share your thoughts.

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