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Quality
46 DC VELOCITY FEBRUARY 2015 www.dcvelocity.com
O’Neill, global packaging engineer
for the supply chain services company ModusLink Global Solutions.
Regular communication and shar-
ing forecasts will help both parties
avoid surprises. “If you think some-
thing will change, let your suppli-
ers know,” he advises. O’Neill also
recommends buying strategically
from multiple suppliers to ensure
the availability of materials.
2Inspect before you accept. In a high-volume DC, the last thing you want is for defective pack-
aging materials to be inducted into
a line. Examples include misprinted
cartons and labels that smudge, to name
just a few possibilities. You may not find
out there’s a problem until orders make
it part way through the line, O’Neill says,
and if your supplier can’t immediately
deliver replacements, you might have to
shut down the line temporarily. A formal
procedure for verifying that all incom-
ing shipments of packaging supplies are
correct and up to standard will help you
prevent stoppages, he says.
3Minimize refilling of consumables. The more often you have to refill supplies like label stock, liquids,
glue, tape, and the like, the more often
you’ll have to slow down or stop a line, or
take an employee away from a worksta-
tion to refill them. “That’s why whenever
we have any consumables in a packaging
line we’re designing, we like to put in
the largest magazine possible,” says Jay
Moris, president of systems integrator
Invata Intralogistics. Adding extra capac-
ity does add cost, he says, but smaller
magazines and reservoirs can negatively
affect uptime. Furthermore, if a piece of
equipment depends on an operator to
notice when consumables are getting low,
then a larger container requiring fewer
refills will reduce the opportunity for an
operator to miss a refill signal or wait too
long to replenish supplies.
4Build in redundancy. Automated packaging equipment is expen- sive, so buyers may be reluctant to
acquire and maintain spare equipment.
But if a critical piece of machinery goes
down, the resulting delays could be far
more costly than the price of a spare. “You
can save money if you buy cheaper equipment, use smaller magazines, or don’t
keep spares, but if you end up with two
hours of downtime on Cyber Monday,
nobody will care about the money you
saved,” Moris observes. Anything that
could not be handled manually is a candidate for backup; if a box taper went
down, for example, taping could be done
by hand, albeit more slowly, but a label
printer could not be replaced with manual labor. Moris recommends integrating
critical spare equipment into the line so
that in an emergency, you could immediately switch over to the backup machine,
rather than have to pull it out of storage
