No Two Boxes Are Alike

Knowledge can really help you in business.  Knowing what is what and how things work are key to staying ahead of the competition. In 2021 I have been busy learning how to improve our own business and some of that came with the idea of using different boxes.  That seems like a pretty simple thing and if you had asked me last year I would say a box is a box and that they are all pretty much the same.  But with the search to be competitive in this day's shipping market and with the fact that our company ships heavy items.  This leads me down a path to discovery on how to save money.

We now had to ship heavy items instead of putting them in a car at the store.  Most people would call our company a brick and mortar business and that has been what we were for years.  But with the foot traffic simply not legally allowed we moved to an online company.  We had done shipping in the past, but due to the weight we usually just found a super heavy box that we had been shipped and shipped our items out.  But this year all items are being shipped out and we are having to spend extra money to make that happen.  We all know super heavy boxes cost a lot of money.

So, the packages needed to do it correctly without any thoughts of damage or tearing happening.  So that was my first task was to find boxes we could use to ship our products out in.  I am a big fan of local and amazingly the laws allowed giant companies who are filled with people to stay open.  Ironic, but I looked locally and got prices for boxes and tape.  Shipping supplies at this location were pretty expensive and I was not even sure if they would work.  

Now I looked on Amazon and was not too thrilled about what I found.  It took me a while to find a company that would give good shipping and the price seemed to be about 20% less on Amazon.  This seemed the way we were going to have to go, but I was still not sure if these items would work for our heavy products.  It was a risk and I wasn't ready to spend thousands of dollars on a company I couldn't contact or call.  The customer service was flat-out trash. 

The best answer came when I found a shipping supplies company that specialized in this sort of thing.  This company told me all about the industry and gave me the low down on how boxes are made and the different ones for different tasks.  There are heavy-duty boxes that are actually corrugated boxes and they can handle the weight of our products without fear of having issues.  But the tape I was using would not hold the weight so I learned what stuff was correct. 

We all have fears and I was afraid the price would be insane because this was more specialized, but with bulk pricing, I was able to get the correct items for us at a 10% discount from amazon pricing.  But that was just the right answer and I was super happy with the outcome and service that was provided. 

Is the Packaging Ready for Clamp handling

Clamp handling in supply chain operations can help to reduce the labor costs, accelerating the product distribution. But can it also cause problems with your packaging? The simple answer is yes.  The extreme horizontal force can cause your packaging to get squeezed, and it can crush them. But as supply chains grow to evolve and consumers are now expecting either same-day or next-day types of packaging, the new systems to expeditated the movements through distribution is possible. Clamp handling is a good way to reduce the manual labor, while also creating quicker truck loading and unloading. For a lot of packaging consultants, there is more and more clamp handling being used, and with more high-volume products getting pushed around, the loads typically are floor-loaded and consolidated, where they’re unloaded by hand or by a clamp truck. Clamp handling is a good way to move everything, and it has a ton of benefits, especially ease of use and the like, but packaging can be negatively impacted by this. Here, we’ll go over the good parts and the drawbacks associated with this. 

The Benefits 

The benefits of clamp handling are simple. There is trailer cub optimization, which for those who are familiar with the inbound and outbound types of inventory, you probably know this as the absence of pallets to move or load the products by putting them directly on the floor of the trailer, which saves a lot of the pallet space and the trailer capacity. By eliminating the sue of pallets, you’re offering more of a volume for the payload. In the logistics and packaging world, space is a money number, so if you’re trying to “cube out” the trailers, you want to consider this. 

This also is a lot cheaper too, since it can save you hundreds on this, and also saves you money on stage and inventory. It also means less costs for labor, so the staff is able to handle, and also can be loaded or unloaded onto multiple types of trucks. 

The Drawbacks 

The biggest drawback is the fact that most packaging isn’t designed for this, since it’s been changed to ECT grade board, which isn’t good for stacking vertically, supports compressive loads and stacking, and it can be subjected to horizontal compression from the clamp handling, so you may want to add more board or packaging for this. There is also the lack of operator training, since this can cause packaging fatigue in a lot of cases, since operators may not be trained beforehand, or trained as much as they should be. 

The clamp truck operator should be doing this for at least six months, but in a lot of cases, there are some who are just placed out there, which causes a lot of hazards to clamping, so you want to make sure that if you’re going to use this, you make sure you’ve trained the operator. Finally, there is the problems with equipment operations, since a lot of times, there isn’t one set change of pressure for this, but in order to do this, you can now use ne tools to adjust the parameters that’s needed on this.While there is definitely a lot of issues to be had with the clamp operations, you want to make sure that you prepare your products for this. If you’re going to use clamp handling, get it ready, and see for yourself if this is right for you to use, and if there’s any changes that you should put in place before you begin with this as well for you.