The UAE plastics transition: manage the SKU change

The first operational step is to determine which SKUs are affected. That is a product-level exercise, and it cannot be done at the level of a product family or a material category, because the position depends on what each item is and how it is used.

The exercise produces two lists, and the second is as important as the first. The affected list drives the transition. The unaffected list matters because it prevents unnecessary change: a business that redesigns more of its portfolio than the measures require spends money and effort on changes that deliver nothing, and it may create new problems — a replacement that performs worse, or a cost increase — for no reason.

Within the affected list, the relevant distinctions are which SKUs are affected at which stage, what the replacement will be, and whether the replacement is a different product, a different material or a different way of delivering the same service. Those are different kinds of change with different lead times and different customer consequences.

Where a measure takes effect on a date, the stock that exists on that date is a planning problem. A business holding inventory of an affected product at the point it can no longer be supplied has an asset it cannot sell through normal channels.

Managing this requires knowing the stock position, the rate at which it is consumed, and the date from which the product can no longer be supplied. Run rates can be accelerated where the lead time allows; where it does not, the business must decide how to handle the remaining stock, and that decision has a cost that should be recognised rather than discovered.

The same applies at the customer end. Customers may hold stock of a product a business has supplied, and may have built their operations around it. A customer who discovers at the point of supply that a product is no longer available is a customer with a problem the supplier created, and their operation may need to change in ways that take time — different handling, different equipment, different storage, different staff practice.

What helps here is working the transition at the customer level well ahead of the effective date, and where the rules on supplying stock require it, taking qualified advice on the position rather than assuming.

The most frequent mistake in a plastics transition is to treat the replacement as a material change: same product, different material. That works when the replacement is functionally equivalent and behaves the same way, and it fails when it does not.

A replacement should be assessed as an operating solution against the job the original was doing. What does it need to hold, carry, seal, protect or present? How does the customer use it, and does the replacement change that use? Is there a service-format change that would be better than a like-for-like replacement — a different way of delivering the same outcome that avoids the constraint altogether?

That last question is worth taking seriously, because some transitions are better solved by changing how a service is delivered than by finding a substitute for an item. Where the measure addresses a specific product, the outcome the customer wants may be achievable another way, and a business that can offer that is offering something more useful than a compliant replacement.

Total cost belongs in the assessment alongside the unit price: the cost per unit, any change in performance or failure rate, the handling changes, the customer's own cost of adapting, and any effect on the customer's experience. A replacement that is cheaper per unit and more expensive per use is not cheaper.

And the boundary, which this article has been careful to hold throughout: nothing here determines which products are in scope, states any exemption, or describes any penalty. Those depend on the current measures and their treatment of the specific product, and should be established from the source — with qualified advice where the exposure is material.