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MODEX BOOTH NR 5118
Yet while small changes to the primary packaging can save
them big money, some consumer goods companies can be leery
of making the cuts. “That’s their advertisement at the store
level,” explains Peter Stirling, executive vice president of the
consulting firm Supply Chain Optimizers.
One way to get around that concern is to reduce the depth
of the box while leaving the height and width intact. This was
the tactic Supply Chain Optimizers pursued with a client that
made cake mixes. There was significant “head space,” or air, at
the top of the primary packaging, but the company didn’t want
to lose that advertising space. So it changed the depth of the
box. “Therefore, the product comes up higher in box, but the
consumer still sees the exact same image (on the box), and the
advertising value of the primary packaging remains the same,”
says Stirling. By reducing the depth of the primary packaging, the
company was able to increase the number of cake boxes it could
put in a corrugated shipping box, which allowed it to fit more
cases on a pallet. The warehouse and transportation savings
amounted to $100,000, Stirling says.
2. Change the count. Sometimes you don’t even need to
change the size of the packaging; you just need to reconfigure it
so you can fit more product inside. A health and beauty company
that Blanck and Chainalytics once worked with saved a quarter
of a million dollars by changing the package to allow products to
nest inside it differently, which reduced the package profile. The
new package also resulted in a smaller case, which saved materials
and drove cube efficiencies. “It created a 50-percent increase in
product density, so there was more on a pallet,” explains Blanck.
When you increase product density like this, it can create a
kind of ripple effect, according to Blanck. “It’s important to
understand that when you increase density and can get more on
a pallet, it means that you are gaining efficiencies in warehousing
and storage and in transportation, and you are also reducing
handling and labor,” he says.
3. Alter the size of the shipping case. Making small adjustments to the secondary packaging (the box or case in which the
product is shipped) can also produce big savings. For example,
by slightly altering the size of a case of product and how it was
unitized on the pallet, Chet Rutledge, director of private branding packaging for Wal-Mart Stores, was able to add an extra
layer of product on the pallet. That extra layer allowed Wal-Mart
to get more product into each truckload shipment. As a result,
the retailer was able to cut down on the number of shipments of
inbound product by several hundred over the course of a year.
4. Leave a gap. And sometimes the changes to the shipping
case don’t even have to affect the box’s overall size. Walking
through the DC one day, Rutledge began to wonder whether
he could use less material to create the shipping cases for Wal-Mart’s private-label cereals. At the time, the company was shipping its cereal boxes in a “full-coverage” regular slotted carton
created by gluing the flaps together. Could Wal-Mart get away
with cutting the size of the flaps by an inch? The box would now
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