OPPORTUNITIES AWAIT
Picture this: You’ve developed a great new product. Let’s call it a Whatsit. Your Whatsits are going to be the most important advancement in your industry in the last decade. You’ve honed your operation to be as productive as possible. You know who your target audience is, how you’re going to market your Whatsits to that target audience, and how you’re going to make your Whatsits in a highly automated, repetitive process.
Plus, because you know you’re going to be shipping lots of Whatsits, you’ve secured an agreement with a local distributor to house up to 50,000 Whatsits at a time and send them out from a centralized location. Shipping at such volumes means lower costs, which means happier customers, which means more repeat business, which means better margins.
But if you’re not careful, you might end up with clogs in the system. Your well-designed product, fine-tuned marketing, and cost-effective shipping could be undone with inefficiencies in one critical part of the process: Packaging.
A KINK IN THE HOSE CAN CAUSE DELAY AND LOSS
Packaging can often become the bottleneck in an otherwise well-designed system. Think back to Lucy and Ethel on the chocolate conveyor belt. They had all good intentions of getting every last piece of chocolate wrapped. However, they just couldn’t keep up. No matter what they did, they missed pieces (waste), they short-wrapped some products (lower quality), they stole (theft!), and ultimately they ended up with low production (inefficiency).
The same may be true of your packaging process. Your Whatsits come off the production line ready to be packaged, but all of a sudden you have a convoluted series of steps for grabbing individual packages (wasted time), fumbling through individual labels (undocumented process), stuffing Whatsits haphazardly into boxes (inefficiency), and ultimately ending up with a disordered, clumsy pallet of materials that barely fits on the truck to the distributor. Not to mention being nowhere near optimized for cost-effective delivery.
And just which items came from which production run, anyway? Do your labels have that information? Do they help you to track the source materials? They should, but it’s likely they don’t, unless you’ve invested in your packaging process as much as your production process. These kinds of kinks may be afterthoughts during R&D, but they’re real headaches once you go live.
STRAIGHTENING IT OUT FOR MAXIMUM EFFECTIVENESS
Packaging Integration is just one of the many ways Quantum Solutions helps to reduce these bottlenecks and inefficiencies. With easily-trackable, easily-shippable, easily-storable packages, your customers get what they want at lower cost, and you have documentation of each step along the way. As a part of a full line integration, the entire process could even be managed through one single control system.
But it doesn’t happen by accident. And it doesn’t happen unless you actually work at it. QSI has years of experience integrating, programming, and optimizing packaging lines to eliminate such problems.
One example of creating an efficient packaging and tracking system is the iGPS integration for a Kraft Heinz facility. Read here how the implementation of a QSI-designed solution, which worked within the existing capabilities of their facility, enabled them to identify and track over 99.8% of pallets without any operator involvement.
That kind of efficiency doesn’t happen without complete integration from end to end. And Packaging Integration is one of the critical components ensuring high efficiency, reduced waste, and significant profitability improvements.
Contact QSI today to learn more about putting our decades of experience to work for you, ensuring you never again get caught unprepared and unable to keep up.