Engineered Packaging Solutions Reduce Your Total Cost
If you hadn’t considered corrugated packaging an engineered product, you may be missing out on benefits and spending more than you should be. Engineered packaging solutions work to resolve your challenges and may assist in ways you haven’t considered. From optimizing truckloads to reducing material waste, there is a solution that will bring value to your organization; by working with the right partner, that value increases.
Engineered solutions are optimized to provide many benefits.
• Material reduction and lightweighting resulting in environmental gains and reduced shipping costs
• Improved product protection resulting in lower costs from returned products and damaged brand
• Overcoming supply chain challenges improves shipping efficiency and reduces costs
• Improved customer satisfaction resulting in continued retail opportunities or repeat customers
• Reduced total costs result in greater profitability and improved company outlook
Factors Considered for Engineered Packaging Solutions
Buying stock corrugated boxes is an option if you are shipping care packages to your college kid, moving to a new house, or shipping low-cost items. But if you have invested in product development and your company brand, engineered packaging is a way to protect those investments.
A reputable packaging company will evaluate several factors to provide high-quality corrugated packaging that meets your expectations. Collaborating closely with them will ensure that all your needs are met.
Product Specifications
Corrugated packaging’s primary function is to protect your product. Some of the elements that must be considered include the following:
• Physical characteristics – Size, weight, fragility
• Number per carton – Also, the level of protection primary packaging may provide
• Cost – Packaging optimization balances the cost of damaged products and returns vs. the cost of packaging materials. More expensive products may require special considerations for protection.
Your Goals
To determine what factors to optimize, your packaging partners must understand your goal. Are you looking to reduce weight, decrease environmental impact, reduce product damage, combine SKUs, or something else? Your packaging engineer will consider all your goals when designing your boxes.
Your Customers’ Needs
If your customers have specific needs, ensure you tell your packaging partner. Some end users, whether consumers or retailers, may require easy open packaging, fully recyclable materials, or specific carton markings. Communicate these needs to your packaging designer to ensure all requirements are met.
Packaging Facility
Can your packaging partner provide boxes in a way that makes filling them easier? Are there ergonomic factors that should be considered for hand packaging or limitation of your case erector or other automation? If you need them bundled in a specific way that makes using them easier, let your provider know.
Distribution
Your product distribution method may have specific requirements to be met. Certain e-commerce platforms (e.g., Amazon) and brick-and-mortar retailers (i.e., Walmart) may have requirements that must be met. Direct-to-consumer packaging may need additional protection that palleted products don’t require because they are more likely to be dropped and jostled in transit. Some packaging must comply with specific ISTA test procedures, so your packaging partner must know this before designing your packaging.
Pallet requirements must be considered during the design phase as well. For example, do you have a specification for the number of boxes on a pallet, maximum weight, or maximum height, or are cartons per truckload the biggest driver?
Budget
Be forthcoming about your budget. Consider all your packaging materials, including dunnage, pallet wrap, labels, and any printing plates and tooling you may be responsible for. You may have grand ideas, but you may need to make concessions if you don’t have the budget. Working with a partner experienced with creative packaging ideas may help you get closer to your dream without breaking your budget.
Optimized Packaging to Meet Your Needs
Your packaging partner will consider all of the above factors when designing your packaging. Optimized packaging design can reduce product damage and returns, material waste, packaging line inefficiencies, and shipping and handling costs.
Material Selection – The corrugated board and flute sizes will be chosen based on the product and needs. For example, using triple-wall corrugated board doesn’t make sense for a lightweight product, and a large box of watermelons won’t fare well in a double-wall F-flute box. Product dividers and filler materials will also be selected.
Box Dimensions – The box size will be optimized to fit the product or products with the smallest voids possible. Combined with material selection, these considerations help to provide the lightest box that provides sufficient protection for the intended storage and shipping of the product. DIM (dimensional) weight – how many shipping companies determine costs – can be lowered by keeping your box dimensions as close to the product as possible.
Structural Design – There are many styles of boxes, and this, along with material choice, will determine the box’s structural integrity. Your packaging partner may design the box so that you can combine SKUs for similar products, which can help with inventory management costs and prevent costs associated with waste in the case of product obsolescence.
Graphics and printing – Your packaging partner can assist with choosing the most suitable printing method to bring your graphics to life.
By optimizing material selection, box dimensions, and design characteristics, your engineered packaging will protect your product and add to your bottom line.
Axis Corrugated Experts in Engineered Packaging Solutions
Our expert team will work with you to craft the perfect solution to meet your needs. Through a consultative approach, we strive to understand the why behind the process so that we can provide you with the most cost-effective solution.
Through our experience, we’ve come to understand the factors that increase total costs and work to reduce those costs for our customers. In addition to all the ways mentioned above that packaging optimization can reduce total costs, we look for additional opportunities, including the following ways:
• Lead time reductions
• Just-in-time delivery and next-day turnarounds, in many cases
• Quick response to urgent orders and unusual packaging challenges
• Streamlined job workflow, which minimizes production costs and speeds up job processing
• Maintaining an inventory of corrugated boards and materials, enabling us to fulfill short turnaround and specialty orders quickly
• Inventory management, ensuring you always have the boxes that you need
• Improved logistics with our extensive fleet of trucks and dependable logistics partner