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.
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