50 DC VELOCITY AUGUST 2017 www.dcvelocity.com
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AS A WHOLESALE DISTRIBUTOR OF A WIDE RANGE
of consumer electronics, Oklahoma City-based Petra
Industries was looking to improve its order fulfillment
operations before peak holiday shipping season last year.
One area that needed a fix was its “Christmas Wrap” packing line.
Contrary to what its name might suggest, the Christmas
Wrap line was not a value-added station where employees added gift-wrapping and bows. Rather, it was an area
devoted to packing items like outdoor speakers that did
not fit into standard-sized boxes or were too large for envelopes. Workers here individually wrapped each item using
a flexible corrugate material, resulting in a covering that
resembled a Christmas wrapping. Trouble was, the process
was inefficient and increased costs due to low throughput.
Although this particular packing line represented only 3
to 5 percent of the company’s overall output, it offered an
obvious opportunity for improvement.
Johnny Arballo, outbound manager, and Mike Williams,
outbound supervisor, began exploring options to fix their
troubled packing line. They quickly zeroed in on the idea
of “right-size boxes”—corrugate boxes made to the exact
length, width, and height requirements of the item (or
items) being shipped. To provide the necessary equipment,
the Petra executives turned to Box on Demand (BOD),
a Battle Creek, Mich.-based company that specializes in
packaging and box-making technology.
After evaluating Petra’s operations, the team from Box
on Demand came up with equipment recommendations
as well as a plan for improving the floor layout and
order fulfillment flow. Petra gave the project the green
light, but it soon became clear the recommendations
would have to be implemented in stages. The timeline
called for Petra’s equipment to be delivered and installed
in early November 2016, smack in the middle of its
peak shipping season. In the interests of minimizing
disruption, the partners decided to hold off on the pro-
cess improvements for the time being and simply “fit”
the equipment—a Nextmode 2. 5 box-making machine
and Matrix dimensioning scan table—into the existing
operation.
Even with a less-than-optimal packing line setup, the
Once peak season ended, the partners moved
the BOD machine and dimensioning table to their
permanent location, positioning the box machine
so that its output faced the shipping docks. They
also added a roller conveyor to facilitate material
flow and created two pack lines, with a packer
assigned to each station.
Under the new system, a BOD machine operator retrieves items to be shipped in a given
order from the pack cart, scans their dimensions,
As for the results, Petra reports that it has seen a number
of benefits. For one thing, having the right-size box for
each order has eliminated the time and costs associated
with adding void fill, which has helped in turn to eliminate excessive dimensional-weight shipping charges. The
revised layout has freed up 72 square feet of floor space,
allowing for a streamlined and safe fork truck lane, and
the box-making machine has reduced corrugate costs by
18 percent. On top of that, the process has reduced
labor allocated to the non-standard packaging line by
one person, freeing up a worker for other tasks, while
minimizing physical strain on workers and boosting
productivity.
Custom boxes might sound expensive. But for one electronics distributor, an investment in
box-making equipment brought all kinds of savings.
Right-size boxes make cents
