For many years, Jenica Eisenbach was our customer. Now, she’s our global packaging technical service director, ensuring our customers have the support and confidence they need to run our coatings on their canmaking lines – just like she did.
Customer Becomes Employee
A love of science and food lured Jenica to her first post-college job at one of the world’s largest beer companies, but it was the promise of free beer each month that she jokingly says sealed the deal. During her years there, she worked in various roles that included technical manager, quality systems manager, scientist, analyst and lab manager. She later moved to the company’s aluminum packaging division, where she supported domestic and international can plants.
“I worked with all the big coatings companies during these years, and PPG’s service was always superior. If I had a problem, I knew I would get a rapid response from technicians who were very knowledgeable and friendly. I felt like I was one of the company’s biggest customers in the world because of the high level of service that I received. After becoming an employee, you can imagine how surprised I was to learn that packaging is only a small percentage of PPG’s overall business.”
Now that she heads up our global packaging technical services, Jenica is determined to uphold that tradition of service leadership and continue adding value to our name and brand. She oversees a team of around 70 employees who work in her organization structure, some of which she shares with other businesses. Collectively, her team members have more than 500 years of experience in the packaging industry, with many having worked at can plants and other beverage facilities.
Putting It All on the Line
That experience is put into action each day. The most important service is troubleshooting issues with customers’ can-coating lines, which can produce thousands of cans per minute. The issue usually is not with our internal and external can coatings but with another aspect of the process, such as malfunctioning equipment or manufacturing contamination. Regardless of the source, our technicians work with a customer to identify and resolve the issue to minimize costly downtime.
That’s the reactive side of service, but Jenica’s team is also proactive in helping customers get the highest performance out of their lines. Baseline audits with each customer ensure everything is running well, and optimization projects increase a line’s efficiency when using our coatings. Our experts also help train our customers’ employees on not only our coatings but the processes that apply them, which is especially critical in light of employee turnover and shortage issues that canmakers are currently facing.
In some regions of the world, our customers give their local teams the freedom to choose which coating products to run. In Latin America, for example, we lost business to competitors who provided less expensive products. Plant personnel at some of these locations insisted on going back to our products because of our high quality and the service we provide, and they refused to budge on the issue. We’ve won back a lot of that business.
In 2023, the global packaging service team faced one of its biggest challenges yet after a number of U.S. states had passed regulations banning the use of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which historically had been used in exterior can vanishes. We worked hard to stay ahead of the regulatory changes, offering a solution within our PPG ISENSE™ family of external coatings. The challenge was the magnitude of transitioning our customers to this product quickly.
“It took hard work by my team to ensure this product could run on our customers’ existing lines with no issues. Our experience with these lines and the strong partnerships we already had with our customers really helped smooth over the transition. In less than six months, we converted more than 100 lines at some 50 customer locations. It was a One PPG effort, with our supply chain, logistics, commercial, technical and other functions working with us to make this a success.”
Lift Each Other Up
Helping each other succeed is important to Jenica, especially women lifting each other up and sending the elevator back down for other women leaders to rise. That wasn’t the case when she started in the industry two decades ago.
Seeing all the female leaders we have in this industry is impressive and inspiring. The strong presence of women leaders when I was interviewing with PPG made me realize this was a place where I could be challenged and inspired. I love being surrounded by these intelligent, clever, hard-working women who all want the same thing in the end – for our company and ourselves to be successful.
As one of our diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) ambassadors, Jenica understands that DE&I means different things in the different regions of the world.
“In the U.S., women’s equality and racial equality are important. In Asia, it’s a feeling of being safe and doing something that matters. As I expand my global team, I’ll be focused on how we can help address these various priorities. This is one of the things I’m most excited about.”