Packaging Optimization
Challenge
Most people don’t think about the logistics side of eCommerce business. Some of the companies we order from offer a lot of different products. In their distribution centers they need to pick your order from a large warehouse and select the right packaging for this product. This can be a complex issue. Our customer was using too many different boxes to pack their products. Ordering too many different size boxes will increase the piece price of your boxes due to lower run rates. Often the boxes were incorrectly sized. Boxes that are too big unnecessarily increase shipping rates. They were forced to use excess dunnage to keep the products in place. This can create a negative reaction with your customer, since they view the extra void fill as waste.
Solution
Rand-Whitney has a complete team of packaging designers and testing lab engineers experienced in understanding packaging utilization and coming up with tested solutions. We performed a full packaging audit in order to find the most efficient means of packing their products. Looking at comparable sizes, the products that most often go inside them, and their usage rates, we are able to optimize the size of the boxes and reduce the amount of skus. This works on two separate fronts. First, it increases run rates of the boxes due to the reduced skus. This decreases the pricing of our customers’ packaging spend. Second, it provided huge savings for our customer in shipping by eliminating oversized boxes.
Results
Using our expertise in both packaging and shipping, we were able to introduce new box sizes while consolidating others to lower the dimensional weight of our customer’s packages. Our customer ended up saving over $1.5 million on freight!
$1.5
million in Savings
42%
SKU Reduction
