Today’s online shoppers demand their products to be shipped with exact product volumes and in increasingly smaller time windows. For a fulfillment house, it can be difficult to achieve both the speed and flexibility to pack and ship random mixes of items and have them delivered when the client needs them, sometimes within days or hours. Often the most common bottlenecks in fulfillment houses are the set up of shipping supplies (i.e. boxes) and cushioning processes. These also offer the greatest opportunity for improving the time and quality of order fulfillment.
Case erectors or formers are machines in to which magazines of boxes and cartons are fed. The machine then folds and squares up the box and seals any seams with pressure sensitive tape or adhesive. If you do not already use a Case former machine, you can save tons in labor costs by installing one. Some machines even have quick changeover systems for different box sizes. While cycle times vary due to box size and the number of changeovers, rates of 12 to 40 boxes per minute are pretty standard. When using machines like this, it is essential that the quality and consistency of the corrugated boxes are kept to a high standard. If cases are damaged, wet or out of square they can jam the machine, and shut down operations.
Void fill, cushioning and product stabilization can also be automated to reduce cycle times. Void fill can be delivered to the packaging line and engineered to accommodate any number of distribution requirements. Systems can be semi or fully automatic, and when delivered on-demand are done so in a pre-determined amount or at a predetermined rate. You may want to consult the manufacturer of these delivery systems and discuss ways to customize your delivery system. This will depend on the value and fragility of the packaged products, the mode of transportation, and the size of the void to be filled.
By automating these two components of packaging supply delivery, you are guaranteed to experience much faster cycle times in your packaging line.
Tags: shipping supplies, shipping supply