change, let your suppliers know,” he advises. O’Neill
also recommends buying strategically from multiple
suppliers to ensure the availability of materials.
2 Inspect before you accept. In a high-volume DC, the last thing
you want is for defective packaging
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 incoming shipments
of packaging supplies are correct and up to standard
will help you prevent stoppages, he says.
3 Minimize 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 workstation 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 capacity
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.
4 Build in redundancy. Automated packaging equipment is expensive, so buyers may be reluc-
tant 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 equip-
ment, 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 rec-
ommends integrating critical spare equipment into
the line so that in an emergency, you could immedi-
ately switch over to the backup machine, rather than
have to pull it out of storage and shut down the line
to install it. The extra machine can also keep the line
moving while the other is undergoing maintenance or
consumables are being refilled.
5 Make it simpler. Using complex packaging that requires a lot of folding and forming in the line
can really slow things down. For instance, inserts
with multiple folds that take some effort to fit into a
box correctly typically require many time-consuming
touches and may not be easy for people to master.
From the standpoint of speed, says O’Neill, a better
choice would be to use a prefabricated unit, like a
thermal-formed or pulp-molded tray that can be
quickly dropped into the box and fitted around the
product.
6 Take operating speed into consideration. Each piece of equipment requires a different amount
of time to complete its task. To prevent slower
machines from compromising productivity, position
them farther down the line if the packing method
allows. Moris cites the example of a customer that
had to print and insert lengthy packing lists into its
orders. Rather than hold things up waiting for the
multipage lists to print out, Invata placed the printer/
inserter farther downstream. As soon as the ordered
items are “married” to a shipping carton, the system
instructs the printer to produce the packing list, thus
allowing plenty of time for printing before the carton
arrives at the document inserter.
