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says Tara Foote, director of marketing for
Ranpak, a manufacturer of dunnage, void
filler, and dispensers. “It gives you more
control over the amount of material,” she
says. “You know every time that there will be
two feet or four feet of paper going into the
box because it is set to dispense that size.”
Another way to minimize waste is to
choose packaging material that’s reusable,
says Foote. If there’s a mispack or an order is
pulled back for some reason, you can simply
use the paper, cushion wrap, or packing
peanuts in another carton.
Pitfall #2: Choosing the wrong cartons.
It might sound like a trivial matter, but shipping items in the wrong sized cartons can
lead to enormous waste and inefficiency. If
the box is too big, the company ends up paying to ship air. If the box is too small, the
packer will have to remove the items and
repack them, which can slow throughput.
Failure to choose the right carton can cost
a high-volume shipper millions of dollars
over time, says Martyn. For example, too-large cartons may be assessed dimensional
weight charges by parcel carriers and lead to
less-than-optimal trailer and container utilization. And consider this: If an operation
shipping 8,000 cartons a day had to fill out
every carton with four air pillows at 2. 5
cents each, it would spend $800 daily to fill
that space. Multiply that by the number of
days worked annually, and you’re nearing
$200,000—money that essentially will be
thrown in the trash, Martyn says.
Carton selection errors are more common
than you might think. Packers select the
wrong box about 25 percent of the time,
says Jack Ampuja, president of Supply
Chain Optimizers, a consulting firm that
specializes in packaging optimization. And
the problem isn’t limited to operations that
offer a large—and confusing—array of
package choices. “We see packers struggle to
find the right box out of six,” says Ampuja.
To avoid these problems, many high-volume packing operations turn to computer-aided carton selection, Ampuja says. When
automation is not an option, careful training with regular refreshers is needed.
Pitfall #3: Trying to do too much in too
little space. Trying to do multiple tasks in
tight quarters may save space, but it creates
inefficiencies and interferes with work flow,
says Foote. “We have seen operations where
