Partner Article

The machines that never sleep: what maintenance really means in large-scale fibre and corrugated manufacturing

In a year when 86% of UK manufacturers expect their costs to rise, the most expensive thing on your factory floor isn’t energy, materials or labour. It’s an unplanned line stoppage.

Manufacturers are operating in an unusually unforgiving environment. Geopolitical instability continues to disrupt global supply chains unpredictably. Relentless pressures from multiple directions at once are squeezing margins,  be it energy, raw materials, employment costs or logistics. In that context, every variable inside your own four walls becomes more important. The things you can control matter more when the things you cannot are increasingly unpredictable.

Cullen is a large-scale UK manufacturer that has the ultimate control over its products. It makes both moulded fibre and corrugated packaging, operating from a 14-acre facility and producing over a billion units across our two production streams in the past two years alone. It supplies sustainable packaging, often replacing plastic equivalents, to sectors as diverse as fresh produce, medical, retail, food service, eCommerce, cosmetics, healthcare and industrial. Each has its own exacting standards and delivery expectations.

If there is one lesson that decades of manufacturing at that scale teaches you, it is this: your maintenance programme is an asset, not a cost centre. It is the foundation on which output quality, delivery reliability and customer trust stands or falls, across both production lines, every shift, every day.

When you build the machine, you own the problem and the solution
Cullen’s moulded fibre operation is an interesting lesson on ownership. Unusually, it designs and builds all of its own moulded fibre production equipment in-house, with a dedicated team of qualified engineers who live and breathe the machinery they have created. Our corrugated line is maintained by that same team, with deep process knowledge built over generations of continuous operation.

That matters more than ever in the current climate. When supply chains are fragile and lead times are unpredictable, relying on an external OEM for a specialist engineer or a proprietary part is a vulnerability. When something needs attention on its moulded fibre line, its in-house engineering team designed it so they know it intimately. Therefore they can diagnose, fix or iterate on it without waiting on anyone else.

The knowledge stays in-house when it invests in upgrading equipment, as it does continuously, with over £1M in annual manufacturing investment. Process refinements do not disappear when a supplier changes its support model. Decades of accumulated equipment knowledge live in the building, in the people, and in the systems.

Process control, not guesswork
Moulded fibre production is often assumed to be a simple forming process. In reality, it is a highly controlled balance of material behaviour, tooling precision and process conditions. All of which must work together consistently at scale.

At Cullen, much of the company's focus in recent years has been on refining how that control is achieved. On the forming side, they have re-engineered key stages of the wet pressing process. This is the point at which fibres are compressed, shaped and stabilised. By tightening tolerances and improving how pressure is applied across different product geometries, they are able to produce stronger, more consistent products with a smoother finish, while reducing variability across runs. These improvements have been developed and implemented in-house, through extensive trial, iteration and engineering investment.

Alongside this, they have transformed how process inputs are managed. Historically, elements such as dosing and material conditioning relied on manual systems that could introduce variation. Today, these are centrally controlled and automatically regulated, ensuring precise, repeatable inputs across every production run.

The result is not just improved product performance, but a more stable manufacturing process overall. Greater control at this level reduces waste, improves visual consistency and strengthens reliability. All of these ultimately matter to the end customer, even if they never see the complexity behind it.

It is a reminder that in modern manufacturing, “maintenance” is is about continuously refining how the process itself performs.

The workforce is part of the maintenance programme
Technology alone does not keep a manufacturing operation running. The people operating and maintaining equipment carry knowledge that cannot be fully codified in a system or a manual. At Cullen, that operational expertise has been built over decades, and it is something they are deliberate about retaining and developing across both production streams.

Much like a Formula 1 driver who can detect a five-millimetre difference in steering wheel position before the telemetry catches it, a skilled engineer who knows a machine well will often sense something is off before any sensor flags it. For them, it might be a slight change in sound, a subtle variation in output. That kind of embedded knowledge is extraordinarily difficult to replicate quickly, however much capital a competitor deploys. It accumulates slowly, through repetition, through problem-solving, through years on the factory floor.

For them, retaining and developing that workforce is also a maintenance strategy.

Planned intervention beats reactive firefighting
The shift from reactive to planned maintenance is not a new concept, but executing it consistently in a pressured production environment is harder than it sounds. When margins are tight and output targets are close, the temptation to defer a scheduled intervention is real. It is also a short-term calculation that tends to produce long-term costs.

Their view is that the maintenance schedule is non-negotiable precisely because the production schedule depends on it. The two are directly linked. An hour of planned downtime for a scheduled intervention is almost always cheaper than the unplanned equivalent, in both time and cost. In a year when every input cost is rising, that arithmetic has never been more important. It matters whether you’re running a corrugated line processing millions of square metres of board annually, or a moulded fibre suite turning waste paper into precision packaging for the medical sector.

What maintenance excellence actually enables
Reliable maintenance does not just reduce downtime. It creates the operational headroom to take on more complex customer requirements and to deliver on them confidently. When your production process is stable and predictable, you can commit to timescales. When your equipment is well understood, you can adapt it for bespoke customer needs without gambling on reliability.

That is how Cullen has been able to deploy rapid solutions for customers, replacing plastic packaging with a moulded fibre alternative in weeks, not months. Whether that is a spike in supermarket demand for fresh produce trays, a doubling of paint packaging orders from a major retailer, or an urgent requirement from a healthcare customer with zero tolerance for supply failure, responsive scale at speed is only possible when the manufacturing foundation is solid.

In an environment where customers across retail, medical, food service and industrial sectors are themselves under pressure, they need supply chain partners they can genuinely depend on. That operational reliability is what makes the difference.

The unglamorous engine of manufacturing performance
Maintenance rarely makes the headlines. Investment announcements do. New product launches do. But in a high-volume manufacturing environment (especially one operating in the tough conditions we face in 2026) it is the consistency of the maintenance programme that determines whether all those other ambitions are achievable.

External costs will keep rising. Supply chains will keep throwing surprises. The one variable a manufacturer can genuinely control is the reliability of its own operation. Cullen have consistently spent decades building the process knowledge, the engineering capability, and the operational discipline to do exactly that across multiple production lines, serving customers in 35 countries, producing at a scale measured in billions of units. 

In manufacturing, promises are easy. Delivery is what counts.

—

Cullen Packaging is a large-scale UK manufacturer specialising in moulded fibre and corrugated packaging. Operating from a 14-acre facility in Glasgow and serving customers across 35 countries, Cullen designs and builds its own moulded fibre production machinery in-house.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Rob McDonald .