Thought Leadership

tesa is a global brand that has over a hundred years of history and more than 800 adhesive tapes in its product portfolio.

One of its most important contributions to business has been to elevate the perception of adhesive tapes from useful commodity to cost-effective engineering solution.

STEVE PLASTOW, Managing Director of the UK business, explains how.

The very first task that manufacturers of quality adhesive tapes need to address is helping customers understand that the technology involved is demanding and that top performance is something you need to work at.

While it’s always tempting for buyers to go for lowest cost, our response would be to look at the value of the product in relation to the overall manufacturing process and to the end product. Using quality adhesive tapes often delivers high percentage benefits in time and cost, with a better end product. The actual cost of the tape becomes almost irrelevant.

We make every effort to show customers concrete evidence of our technical credentials. When we say we’re experts in tape engineering, that’s exactly what we mean. The business has an impressive research and development centre in Hamburg, supported by laboratories in the USA and the Far East.

When we develop new products, a bespoke dispensing method or a piece of in-line application machinery, this is done with the benefit of hands-on experience. Our guys spend a lot of time with customers on the production line and we provide our test reports so that buying decisions can be made on the basis of the fullest data available.

Let me give you a relatively straightforward but highly significant example of a process improvement to illustrate how valuable the contribution of an adhesive tape can be.

Using tesa’s Easy Splice Film Line tape, we helped one of our flexographic customers reduce the number of operators involved in the splicing process of flexo printing from two to one. Splicing speed was dramatically increased to 480 metres per minute and the failure rate was reduced virtually to zero. Operator time, waste and downtime was all reduced while productivity went up.

Our business files around 70 patents every year for new products, processes and technologies – so if customers are tempted to regard adhesive tapes as basically all the same, we often quote this, just to start them thinking differently. We have some 250 people employed in Research & Development globally, and 5% of our turnover is committed to funding R & D, amounting to almost £50million a year.

Customer focus is so important in this. You don’t really get the detailed knowledge about the specific needs of a manufacturer without investing some time. We have an experienced sales team and each of them has a particular industry focus through their career history and our training programmes.

You cannot place too much emphasis on being customer-facing when you need to demonstrate added value from technical excellence. At tesa UK we originated a programme called “tesacohesion”, which makes the concept of customer care into a set of real, practical offerings. It is based on People, Processes, Products and Performance – the four essential elements of the business relationship. However, it is not simply a concept, it’s a series of practical commitments to the customer where product quality and demonstrable process improvements are achieved by having our sales engineers with their “boots on the ground” out there in the market place.

We’re also enthusiastic about providing on-site support and training for our customers’ staff. This helps immensely in developing standard operating procedures and maintaining quality. When customers’ own staff begin to see the engineering values inherent in the use of adhesive tapes, it’s another key step forward in raising the perception of the products and technology involved.

Sometimes the most dramatic benefits emerge from what seems an obvious solution. For instance, if we can improve a customer’s production process by changing them from 50 metre rolls to 5000 metre rolls, by definition we have reduced the number of roll changes by a factor of 100! We have also reduced product waste as well as increased productivity.

I believe that providing practical help on elements such as Value Chain Management and logistics is a further and legitimate method of the process. Our core business may be in the manufacture of adhesive tapes, but our core values are built around improving the whole of the manufacturing process. We can deliver efficiencies through optimised stock holding and delivery scheduling to raise the bar on supply chain standards.

This is far from being peripheral activity – it can be quite fundamental to many customers and it is another persuasive argument when it comes to assessing the purchase price of our product against the cost benefits we can deliver. Getting the market to view adhesive tape as an integrated element of a holistic quality process is high on our agenda.

Many of the markets in which we operate – Print, Automotive, Building Supply, Furniture, Paper and Packaging just to name a few - are highly competitive and involve high volume businesses. Our task is to ensure that we provide evidence of outcomes which we know will appeal to financial managers along with engineers and heads of production. tesacohesion is a true value proposition which brings the customer measurable improvements on critical issues.

Current business levels suggest that many UK manufacturers and our relationships with them are in good order. I believe that we have lifted the perception of adhesive tapes to where it should be –a true engineering solution that delivers both process improvement and added product values.