Send them packing

Packing is a simple task requiring little or no thought: You pack the goods, seal the box, and send it to the shipping department. Right?

Not quite. This job is tougher than it sounds, and it can wreck your company when handled badly.

“The packing station is the function with the lowest productivity, and the one where the most labor is required,” says Bill Kuipers, a partner in the consulting firm Spaide, Kuipers and Co. “It tends to be one of the most serious bottlenecks in any operation.”

Yet many fulfillment center managers ignore the process.

“I beg clients all the time to stop and watch a packer for five or 10 minutes,” Kuipers says. “Don't say a word; just watch. What appears in the first 20 seconds to be a smooth operation morphs into a situation in which you want to rush over and tell them what to do.”

Let's say you've decided to take a fresh look at your packing unit. Here's a guide on how it should work.

Successful packing begins before the goods reach the packer. “The majority of people pick orders onto a cart or into a tote, then deliver that order to a packing station,” says Wayne Teres, president of Teres Consulting.

But that means you need room for carts around the station, and a system for removing empty ones.

The packing station also has to accommodate all the needed tools.

“Most people make their stations too small,” says Kuipers. “Once you fill them with tape guns, computers, radios, and so on, it's amazing how little room is left in which to pack boxes.”

But those challenges are modest compared with the ones that lie ahead.

Think outside the box

First, there's the box problem. Packers may have up to 15 carton sizes available, and all need to be stored within reach, either above the station or behind it.

In addition, there has to be a method of requesting boxes when supplies run low. And if a packer misjudges the carton size, he has to do something with that already constructed box.

Are you handling the same items multiple times? You can streamline things by picking straight to a box. This can be “a huge home run” for firms selling apparel, DVDs, shoes, or anything with predictable packaging, Kuipers says.

Case in point: PrintingForLess.com, a marketer of online printing services and supplies.

“We used to have bottlenecks due to five different workflow areas being squeezed into one or two shipping stations,” says production manager Krystal Cipriani. “We'd cut a job in one area, then move it on a cart into a line to get shipped, so we'd have a whole line of carts to get through.” But Cipriani figured it out.

“We built shipping stations off every single machine so that we could ship from the spot instead of moving the product,” she says. “On the cutting machine, one person cut while a second person now caught and shipped. On the folding machine, instead of folding and stacking, one person folded and shipped.”

PrintingForLess also cross-trained its employees and started rotating them between tasks every two hours in order to avoid repetitive strain injuries.

The result? The average time to package an item fell from 30 hours to 30 minutes.

“Now we're running 60% early of our promised delivery date instead of 2% late,” says Cipriani. “The changes definitely added to the cost of shipping — more label makers, computers, scales, stations — but the efficiency is good.”

And if most of your boxes fall into only a few sizes? Take a page from Henry Ford and switch to an assembly line, or a series of “speed lines, each one devoted to a particular box size,” Kuipers advises.

“One person makes the boxes and places them on a conveyor line, the second person drops the orders into the boxes and puts a label on them, and the third adds dunnage and seals it,” he says. “Productivity is much higher because it's a semi-automated process.”

While conventional packers might process only 25 packages per hour, a speed line can handle 100, Kuipers estimates. And you can automate part of the job with a bagging machine.