FIBC Manufacturing: A Mixture of Art and Science

Industry Outlook Team

In an interaction with Industry Outlook, Arvind Nopany, Managing Director, Rishi FIBC Solutions Pvt Ltd. shares his views on the evolution of bulk packaging, the challenges involved in manufacturing, and ways to address them.

Bulk packaging is increasingly becoming popular in several industries such as food, chemical, pharmaceutical, construction, mining, and others. How do you see the current evolution of bulk packaging market in India? What are the major factors driving its growth?

The bulk packaging market is slowly but steadily growing in India. The flexible bulk packaging is the fastest growing sector of India’s packaging industry. India is one of the largest manufactures and exporter of bulk packaging (FIBC’S).

Domestically the utilization of bulk packaging (FIBC’S) is less compared to European and American markets but there is huge growth opportunity in India. Some of the factors which drives this growth are:

• With increasing exports from India particularly in food processing, pharma and chemical, requires customized bulk packaging solutions for Indian manufacturer.
• Increasing supportive infrastructure for transportation as well as storage in India.
• Government policies encourage to use recyclable material for packaging in India which FIBC’s comply.
• Increased requirement of customized storage and transportation for various Industries.
• Shortage of skilled labor in India resulting in increased uses of FIBC’s as it is easy in handling and cost effective.

As companies are having cost pressure on all fronts, moving to bulk packaging is one of the ways to bring down the cost. Due to mechanized handling of bulk sacks, overall handling cost also comedown and that is one of the factors driving its growth.

What are the major concerns of industries with regards to bulk packaging? What are their expectations from FIBC bag manufacturers? How can those challenges be addressed, and the expectations be fulfilled?

Mostly in India, the users do not have knowledge of proper utilization of FIBC’s. The users want reliable, customized, and cost-effective bulk packaging solutions from FIBC manufactures along with knowledge transfer like – how to use it for packaging the product (Handling of Bag on site), how to handle while storing the product and at transportation etc.

To address those, challenge the FIBC manufacturers should provide product along with customized solution package to the users.
Quality and timely delivery remain major concern for food and pharma industry and cost is a major concerned for industries which pack low value produce like construction and mining.

Clients expect a clean bag with no contamination. We have a well-defined production process which is monitored. The above criteria is well addressed by us as we have highly qualified professionals and have skilled work force who follow the SOP laid down for each activity so that the customer gets the right bag on time.

Reduction of overall weight of bulk packaging is one of the key factors driving the demand for flexible intermediate bulk containers. How does the reduced weight advantage stacks up against the protection of the material, especially when compared to metal containers?
FIBCs are made of flexible woven typically polypropylene (PP) and have a capacity to hold 500 kg to 2,000 kg of weight. Flexible intermediate bulk containers lower the total weight of bulk packaging owing to their negligible weight compared to metal containers.

They can be stored in a small space by folding and pressing multiple FIBCs together which is not possible with metal containers. Metal containers may occupy the larger space and difficult to handle as they have their own weight which is much higher than FIBC.

By adding a liner to the FIBC, flexible intermediate bulk containers provides the protection which a metal container would offer like environmental protection and physical damage. In addition, these intermediate container also passes through series of tests like drop tests, lift tests, aging test etc., to ensure that the safety factor and safe working load are maintained.

How do you see the disparate bulk packaging requirements of players from different industries?

These flexible intermediate containers are commonly used to store dry and flowable products such as grains, seeds, salts, chemicals, sands, clays, cement, and others. Primary end use of FIBC is to handle raw, semi-finished, and finished granules and small-size materials in industrial premises. Based on the usage and product characteristics FIBC manufacturer provides customized solutions to the end uses. For Example:
1. Base requirement: - Normal bags having filling and discharge spouts.
2. For Hygroscopic Material: - Bags with liners inside
3. For Hazardous Material: - UN certified bags
4. Based on the static requirement: - Type C (Conductive) or Type D (Dissipative)
5. To avoid bulging: - Bags having Baffle

How can the FIBC bags be customized according to their unique requirement?

FIBC are customized based on the characteristics of products and bulk density of the products. Food and Pharma grade FIBC are customized and produced under high end hygiene areas along with virgin raw material (PP).
FIBC are also customized based on their storage requirement to avoid bulging. It is also customized based on available transportation facilities.

For a manufacturer, what are the challenges in ensuring the quality of FIBC bags? What is the methodology followed by your company for quality assurance?

FIBC manufacturing is mixture of Art and Science. It is not completely automized. It is labor intensive industry and requires skilled laborer for generating quality output.FIBC’s are highly customized product and there are lot of manual intervention of people at every stage of production. With this maintaining quality of each unit of FIBC is the utmost challenge.

When the product is produced with set of skilled labor, for continuous performance manufacturer require to invest heavily on training and development of laborer at the same time competitiveness in manufacturing segment affects the retention level of required skilled manpower.

Following methodology is followed by our company for quality assurance while producing FIBC’s,
• Plan – We plan and establish the process and determine the processes that are required to deliver a high-Quality FIBC.
• Do - Development and testing of Processes and "do" changes in the processes as per requirement.
• Check - Monitoring of processes, modify the processes, and check whether it meets the predetermined objectives.
• Act – Our quality assurance tester implements actions that are necessary to achieve improvement in the processes.

At our company, FIBC is strictly inspected at every stage of production line. Every stage is having defined acceptance criterion against defined quality parameter and the product has 100% comply to that criterion. The defined criterion is reviewed on quarterly basis.

Where do you see the Indian bulk packaging market in the near future? What is the future road map for your company to overcome the emerging challenges in this domain?

The flexible bulk packaging is the fastest growing sector of India’s packaging industry. Still there is lots of scope. With increasing education on usage of FIBC it will further grow with different segments like Food, pharma, chemical, Dairy (Milk Powder) etc.

Being the global supplier of the choice, we keep ourselves updated with latest knowhow of FIBC industry including the disparate requirement of the customers. We are investing in R&D to improve our product efficiency and working closely on optimization of bottom line so that we can remain competitive not only in domestic markets but also in international markets.

Growth in India’s manufacturing sector is accelerating and we see advances in demand of bulk packaging too. Overall we see 15 – 18% growth in bulk packaging requirement in India.
RISHI FIBC has been set up in year 2008 and we have been growing @ 35% CAGR since inception. Our growth plans for the future are also well defined and we hope to continue growing at this paces and maintain our position amongst the top three FIBC producers globally.

We will continue to allocate adequate resources for Research & Development, training of our manpower and follow ethical standards of operation, so that we continue to be leader in our space.