A packaging ROI figure is the least interesting part of the proposal to the person reviewing it. What they want is the mechanism: where the money is saved, on which line, in which month, and what breaks the mechanism. Answer those and the percentage almost takes care of itself.
Where does the saving appear
Named budget lines, with amounts. Usually consumables purchased, sometimes disposal, occasionally labour. If the saving appears in a budget that belongs to a different department, say so explicitly – cross-departmental savings are the ones that get challenged hardest, and pre-empting the question is worth more than the number.
If part of the saving is avoidance – spend you would otherwise incur next year rather than spend you stop today – label it as avoidance. Reviewers treat the two differently and conflating them costs credibility.
When
A phased profile, not an annual average. There is an outflow at the start while the fleet is bought, then savings as single-use purchasing stops. Cash flow matters to finance more than annualised return, so show the trough – how deep, how long, and when it turns positive.
Staged purchasing usually improves this and is easy to propose: buy the fleet in tranches as each site converts, so the outflow tracks the saving.
What breaks it
Say it yourself before they ask. Loss rate is the big one – if a quarter of the fleet leaves the loop in year one, the model collapses, and a reviewer who finds that before you do will assume you did not look.
Then volume: if throughput falls, trip counts fall and payback stretches. And price: resin moves, and a fleet that needs topping up annually is exposed to it.
For each, state the trigger and what you would do. That section is what makes a proposal look like it was written by someone who thought about it.
Two things that help
A pilot with a threshold – a small deployment with an agreed number that decides whether the rest proceeds. It reduces the ask, and it converts an argument into a measurement.
And a written assumption register. One page listing every assumption, who owns it, and what would falsify it. Cheap to produce, and it answers three questions at once.
The payback mechanics for a specific product family are worked through in estimating pallet sleeve payback.
How to answer the discount-rate question
If finance applies a discount rate or a hurdle rate to a multi-year saving, ask what it is before you build the model – otherwise you will present an undiscounted payback and be told the number is wrong.
For most packaging projects the payback is short enough that discounting barely changes the answer, which is a useful thing to be able to say rather than discover.
The question behind the questions
What a reviewer is really assessing is whether you have thought about it. Two things signal that better than any projection: a sensitivity table, and a written list of what would make the project fail. Both are quick to produce and both are disproportionately persuasive.
Also worth stating plainly: what the decision is if this is not funded. A request that names the alternative gets taken more seriously than one that assumes approval.
What we can do
We supply recyclable plastic cable reels and will state our assumptions in writing, including the ones that are unfavourable. Tell us your volumes and we will give you the numbers – and the conditions under which they stop being true.