When you’re looking for ways to benefit your company’s supply chain, you probably look for ways to reduce time or costs in various departments. In most cases, this comes down to the way you might ship, store or produce the products you sell. But what about the way you package those products? Product packaging isn’t typically something you think about in supply chain and logistics, but it actually plays a major role in shipping and producing your products. Package optimization of your products for supply chain management can actually save your companies both time and money.
What Is Package Optimization?
If you’ve never heard of package optimization before, don’t worry — most manufacturers haven’t. Most companies leave packaging decisions to designers and marketing experts who understand how to make the product fly off the shelves. Unfortunately, this can add time and costs to the supply chain process.
Package optimization is a process where supply chain specialists look for ways to make the product’s packaging more friendly to the supply chain system. By making small tweaks to the way a product is packaged, they hope to save time and money in producing and transporting products.
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Top Reasons You Should Optimize Your Packaging
Package optimization has many different benefits, from not wasting money on unnecessary materials to creating a more sustainable package. Let’s look at some of the ways package optimization can help a company’s supply chain:
- Optimize Your Materials
The materials you use for packaging could be holding your supply chain down. If you’re using products that are expensive, wasteful or difficult to use, you’re adding time and money to your supply chain that you can’t afford. While you don’t want to decrease the quality of your product or the perception of your brand, you can typically reduce or change your packaging materials without your customer noticing.
Optimizing your packaging means making smarter decisions about the packaging of the product itself and the shipping materials you use to get the product from Point A to Point B. See if you can find alternatives, such as using hot-melt instead of tape, that can save you both time and money. Through package optimization, you should look at each and every material you use in the packaging process.
- Package Optimization Allows for Sustainability
Creating plastic containers or cardboard boxes can have serious consequences on our environment. With so many companies looking for ways they can go green, package optimization can be one of the best ways to promote sustainable business practices.
Companies can look for ways to use less materials and reduce their carbon footprint. Whether you choose to use a thinner plastic or recycled cardboard, there are many different ways to make your package more sustainable. Not only can this help save your company money, but you’ll get bonus points with your customers for being environmentally friendly.
- Make Transportation Easier
When you’re preparing cargo for shipment, you’re looking at things like size and weight of your boxes of product. Not only does this include the size and weight of the product itself, but also the packaging it is in. If you’re not using optimized packaging, you could be wasting space and weight that could be occupied by more product.
Optimizing your product package allows you to eliminate the unnecessary excess you could be wasting your money on. By reducing the amount or changing the shape and size of the packaging you’re using, you can transport more product — saving you both time and money.
- Finding the Right Package Optimization for You
When looking for the appropriate way to package your items, you need to consider both complexity and efficiency. To reduce complexity, you want to have as many similar packages as possible, but to improve efficiency, you want each item to have its best package. For companies with a wide variety of products, this can be difficult to balance.
Finding the optimal level of complexity and efficiency is crucial. When you find the right balance, you can lower your shipping costs, save space and weight with each shipment. You’ll save money in the long run, too.
Unnecessary costs hurt everyone. From your company to your customer, spending money on wasteful practices means everyone is getting a bad deal. Properly optimizing your packaging can mean you save money and time all throughout the supply chain process — putting more money in your company’s pocket.
No matter what industry you’re in, package optimization is important for both your business and the environment. Consider this when determining what kind of packaging you should be using for your company’s products.
Source : http://cerasis.com/2017/03/29/package-optimization/