Key areas of focus for packaging efficiency and cost savings

Transport density – Are you shipping a lot of air? Making sure that the packaging protects not only the product but is designed to use transport container and pallet space in an optimal way will save you cost in transportation and warehousing. Redesigning for packaging efficiency can increase the number of products shipped by 30 percent per container. Even just “slimming” a triple wall carton to a strong single wall and leaving the inner box dimensions unchanged can usually achieve a 10 percent higher container load.

Damage rates – Do you know how many damaged products get delivered to your warehouse? You can’t influence the way your products are handled during transport but you can design the packaging to protect them. The right packaging will not only save cost in claim procedures but increase in-store availability and revenues.

Packaging material and specifications – Is your packaging fit for purpose? It happens quite often that packaging is over specified to be on the safe side. That leads to additional cost not only for packaging materials but also higher recycling fees. Packaging that is not strong enough on the other hand will result in transport damages (see above) and need for repacking. By adapting the specifications to your supply chain requirements, you can save time, money and material – right weighting instead of light weighting.

Packaging has an impact throughout the supply chain. Taking a closer look into your transport density, damage rates and packaging materials and specifications is a great place to start if you are looking to find areas of savings. And the packaging efficiency improvements can have a positive effect on the environment as well.