For ecommerce businesses facing the all-important Christmas peak, the combination of high demand, huge product variability and acute time constraints can create a packaging nightmare. Chris More, UK Sales Director at Packsize, suggests a simple way of securing process resilience.
For many ecommerce businesses the ‘golden quarter’, up to and through Christmas and New Year, represents a disproportionate share of business revenue and, if handled effectively, profit too. But this comes with many challenges, many of which reveal themselves within the despatch packing operation.
Festive demand creates fulfilment challenges
Variability is the enemy of fulfilment efficiency, and the festive season has this in spades. Not only must businesses handle significantly higher order volumes and meet increasingly critical delivery deadlines, but they must also manage a much wider range of goods. Some products only appear during the festive season, while manufacturers often introduce seasonal packaging in new shapes and sizes for products they sell throughout the year. Customers also place more orders containing multiple product lines, requiring businesses to consolidate and despatch them together. No two orders are alike.
Meanwhile, the operational constraints of fulfilment are mounting. Labour availability remains poor and its associated costs are increasing significantly, rising diesel prices are heavily impacting transport prices and packaging materials aren’t getting any cheaper, and are increasingly regulated. What’s more, with regards packaging waste, consumers do not welcome excesses of cardboard and bubble wrap when the next recycling bin collection may not be until the New Year.
Throwing casual or temporary labour at the problem, training them to select the right carton or how to manually form boxes, insert void fill properly, and so on, is costly, time consuming, and introduces more variability and rework. Reliability and performance at this sensitive time is critical. Failure to deliver on-time in the Christmas peak can do significant harm to customer sentiment, repeat business and overall profitability.
Automation tackles the packaging bottleneck
So how do you ensure process resilience at peak, without breaking the bank or eroding margin? The solution to the packing problem, the boxing bottleneck, lies in automation. But not all forms of transit-boxing solutions deliver the versatility, scale and exacting size requirements needed to cope with highly variable product shapes and order quantities. An oversized box is fundamentally wasteful. ‘Right-sizing’ each box for every order makes the most sense, saving on materials, transit volumes and packaging waste. Doing this at immense speed, with high reliability, backed-up by a 24/7 service hotline, is the key to building process resilience at peak.
Automated packing solutions from Packsize can create boxes ‘right-sized’ for each individual order. They can be filled manually or erected around each selection of goods, closed, sealed and labelled fully automatically ready for despatch. Packsize customers experience an average 40% reduction in box size.
Automated ‘right-size’ packing systems address many of the challenges of peak. They dramatically reduce labour requirements, often replacing up to 20 manual packing stations. They also eliminate the issue staff face in recognising what size and shape of carton is appropriate, and how to fill it efficiently.
Ending reliance on ‘briefly-trained’ casual staff greatly reduces product damage, both in the packaging process and later in transit. The need to procure and store a wide range of preforms or erected boxes is eliminated. This frees up both space and funds. ‘Right sizing’ yields significant economies in use of corrugate, up to 30%, while all but eliminating void fill, often bubble wrap.
Building resilience beyond Christmas
Critically for peak season, automation transforms a highly variable set of operations into a predictable and manageable process. This allows businesses to optimise pick rates, movements, staff allocation and other factors to meet demanding fulfilment requirements. Businesses can also accommodate new products with different packaging shapes and sizes using existing material stock, ensuring maximum flexibility.
Of course, not all businesses need high-speed, high-volume throughput. Right-sizing solutions are available for all businesses, large or small, with varying levels of automation, capacity and throughput.
But it’s worth remembering, automated packing stations aren’t just for Christmas. Even off-peak, savings in material inventory and usage, transport, and labour provide a solid RoI case. Automation can be integrated with warehouse management/control systems, conveying, sortation and picking processes. This brings structure and consistency to an otherwise variable and unpredictable environment.
Automated ‘right-size’ boxing technology offers the flexibility, speed and reliability to secure process resilience throughout the busiest peaks. But, of course, for the rest of the year too.
