How to reduce business costs with packaging supplies

Not only is it beneficial to optimise and develop your packaging operation to reduce costs, but alternative packaging supplies can help your business become more eco-friendly and provide better protection for your products too.

Where some companies fail though, is when the quality of packaging is reduced considerably in the attempt to reduce overheads. This often leads to cheaper, poorer quality materials that simply don’t offer sufficient protection during storage and transport. With this, damaged returns increase, costing the business both valuable time and money.

Here are 3 ways your business can reduce packaging costs without sacrificing quality.

1. Analyse your warehouse layout

How your warehouse is arranged plays a huge part in the reduction of costs for your business. Are your packaging supplies organised in fashion? Could changes be made to streamline your layout and speed up your picking process? When it comes to saving costs, warehouse efficiency is key. If staff members are using up considerable amounts of time looking for the correct packaging money is being wasted. If you’d like to improve your existing packaging operations, try working through the following steps:

1. Analyse your current inventory of packaging supplies. Make a list containing quantities and note down any key findings such as large quantities, small quantities, regularly used, etc.
2. Using the list, identify similar items that can be grouped together
3. Then identify infrequently used packaging materials and group those together
4. Use your findings to place grouped packaging supplies relevant to your packing station. This should include moving frequently used packaging supplies closest to the station, with infrequently used supplies furthest away. While doing this, similar packaging products should be grouped to make locating them easier and quicker. For example, you may want to group your paper packaging separate to your plastic packaging.

Overall, your goal is to reduce several packaging lines into a few, highly optimised packaging lines. This will help you reduce labour costs by minimising unnecessary movement, while saving on storage space too.

2. Speed up your packaging process with machinery

Similar to optimising your warehouse layout, packaging machinery can help speed up your operations, ultimately saving your business money. To put things into perspective, your workforce could be wasting valuable time with the following manual tasks:

1. Taping and securing boxes
2. Stretch wrapping pallets
3. Strapping boxes and pallets

With the introduction of packaging machinery, a quicker process can be achieved, and you’ll free up time for your workforce too. As a bonus, packaging machinery can also reduce the chances of repetitive strain injury, commonly caused by manual tasks such as pallet wrapping.

But what packaging machines are available for you business and what benefits do they bring?

Automated pallet wrap machines

Automated pallet wrap machines can secure an entire pallet with the push of a button. They’re extremely efficient to use, cost-effective, and programmable to suit your requirements. At Swiftpak, our automatic pallet wrap machine:

• Eliminates strain from manual wrapping
• Saves on wasted film from excess or insufficient wrapping
• Reduces overall wrapping time
• Improves load stability for a safer transport

Automated taping machines

Just like the pallet wrap machine, an automated taper can perfectly seal your box from a push of a button. This helps to eliminate human error, providing a more secure package with less chance of damaged returns. Our PAKTOOL taping machine benefits your packaging operation by:

• Improving brand image with consistent sealing
• Saving money through increase productivity and efficient tape usage
• Reducing damaged returns

Automated strapping machines

Effectively and efficiently strap your packaging with automated strapping machines. Once again, this helps increase warehouse productivity as well as the consistency of strapping. At Swiftpak, we offer a range of fully automatic and semi-automatic strapping machines to suit the needs of your packaging operation.

For more information on automated packaging machinery, or if you’d like to find out more on how Swiftpak can help increase the productivity of your operations, speak to one of our experts today.

3. Minimise damaged returns with protective packaging

Product damage costs your business heavily, both in the way of time and money. Having to deal with the returns process, ship out a replacement, and manage customer expectations is time consuming. All of this can be easily avoided with the right protective packaging solution. In order to achieve a proper protective packaging solution, you should collaborate with an experienced packaging supplier.

At Swiftpak, we have over 40 years experience supplying protective packaging solutions for products that require personalised protection. From pharmaceuticals to food, electronics, automotive, construction and precision engineering, we can supply a packaging solution your product deserves.

Free, no obligation packaging audits from Swiftpak

All of the above sounds great doesn’t it? But do you have the time and packaging expertise to action these points and save your business money? If not, we’ve got you covered. At Swiftpak, we offer free, no obligation packaging audits to uncover the potential of your operation. We dive into the ins and outs of your processes, materials used and lots more.

Claim your no obligation packaging audit