Pack stations take on all of it

It’s easy to overlook the value of pack stations. Jeff Bezos did. Fortunately, one of his employees pulled him back from the brink.

In its very early days, Amazon packed orders on the floor. Yes, all 10 employees got down on their hands and knees to pack orders for shipment. Bezos thought knee pads would be a great innovation. But one of his fellow packers suggested packing tables instead.

Bezos went out the next day and bought several. And, in 2018, said on “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations” that the addition of packing tables was “the most brilliant idea” he had ever heard. He thought they “doubled productivity.” Doubled, indeed.

Today, Amazon, like many other companies, especially those in e-commerce, use pack stations for much more than just pulling together the components of an order as well as boxing and labeling them in final preparation for shipment.

“The story of pack station success comes back to process flow throughout the facility,” says Rod Gallaway, CEO of Packsize.

“Pack stations need to be fully integrated with what’s upstream in the distribution center as well as with the shipping dock. And that includes highly automated materials handling equipment as well as the most manual,” says Jeff Dehnert, president of Dehnco.

Gallaway adds that order flow has to be steady so no activity in the DC is starved or flooded. “It’s the only way to ensure that productivity is maximized,” he says. Pack stations just happen to be near the end of the order fulfillment process.

Dan Hanrahan, president and CEO of Numina Group, adds “think of pick/pack/ship as one continuous process. If there’s a bottleneck in any one element, it will offset gains elsewhere in the process.”

Packsize supplies automated pack stations, Dehnco focuses on manual ones and Numina is equipment agnostic. Yet, all three emphasize the importance of order flow.

As they and others will tell you, there’s more to pack stations than flow. They also serve vital ergonomic and safety functions in packing and shipping, says Rob Doucette, applications engineer at BOSTONtec.

The ergonomic function is self-evident, especially when talking about height-adjustable tables for manual pack stations. Doucette says the trick is to make the tables adjustable to people of all heights and products of all sizes with a minimum of disruption throughout the day.

“These are best when looked at as modular, ergonomic work benches,” says Bob Simmons, vice president at Proline.

Adjustability inherently makes packing operations safer by minimizing the need for packers to twist and turn awkwardly. Doucette sees a strong push right now by companies to focus on ergonomics at pack stations.

Flow, safety and ergonomics are the big picture concerns of pack station design. However, there is a long list of components and layout of the stations that need to be taken into consideration when designing pack stations.

Footprint real estate

The words real estate refer to two quite different, but equally important domains for pack stations.

Customization of pack station design is critical to accommodating specific products, product mixes and shipping requirements.

One is the footprint on the floor. The other is the space inside the shipping box.

Let’s start with the footprint of these stations.

As you have probably already imagined, one-size-fits-all isn’t possible here. While manual pack stations are typically 30 x 60 inches or 30 x 84 inches, those are more starting points than anything else.

BG Edwards, vice president of sales and marketing at Creform, says the widest station his company has supplied lately is 9 feet wide. But the possibilities don’t stop there.

Amazon and many others combine manual stations with semi-automated and nearly fully automated. Others arrange their pack area by general size of items in typical orders, having small items handled at one or two stations and larger items at others.

Doucette rightly calls workstation design a puzzle and says customization is the name of the game based on the specific needs of the operation.

And there’s no great wonder to that. Edwards says a top concern of end users is “having the right supplies in the right spot with no wasted space.”

That list is long for manual stations. Items include: monitors; keyboards; printers; tape machines; scanners; void fill machines; scales; labels poly bags and boxes. Everything has to be some place and in adequate quantity.

But this isn’t getting any simpler, says Simmons of Proline. “Storage of consumables at the stations has increased 25% in the past four or five years. The challenge is to have enough storage that replenishment does not become an overwhelming activity,” he adds.

Or as Dehnert of Dehnco says, “what used to be 10 boxes is now 15 boxes and six polybags.”

Doucette tells the story of L.L.Bean. “They create some of the most thought-out workstations anywhere,” he says.

The process begins with floor engineers who define the problem and solutions to come up with a final design. “This is heavy customization. Those engineers determine the cost of each movement for the packers at the stations,” says Doucette.

“All that’s needed is well within reach. Everything is located in the right place at the right time within the packing process,” says Doucette.

Bean then has BOSTONtec build a prototype that undergoes operator testing for at least a couple of weeks. Operator input is critical to the final design of the workstation. “The ultimate focus is on operator well-being. It’s just L.L.Bean’s culture,” says Doucette.

“A big part of the equation is the return on investment,” says Sean Webb, director of sales and services for North America at Sparck Technologies. This automated pack station supplier works with an ROI spreadsheet that takes into account labor, materials and transportation costs. Webb’s target is 15 months, which holds for automated and manual pack stations.

Box real estate

Almost all conversations about pack stations get into the size of the shipping box or envelope since freight is close to becoming the biggest cost in the pack/ship process today, says Dehnert.

That makes right sizing shipping boxes and bags critical to cost control.

Even at the most manual stations, we are well past the time of one-box-fits-all shipments. As was said, it’s standard to have many size boxes and bags on hand. A warehouse management system (WMS) is often used to guide the operator to the right size box for a particular order. In turn, that determines the amount of void fill needed.

Storage of consumables at stations has increased 25% in the past few years, says Simmons of Proline.

Hanrahan of Numina Group talks about the expanded role of warehouse execution systems (WES) to perform from order release to picking and shipping. It starts with grouping like orders in the DC, then picking to totes or shipping containers based on pack and ship rules to manage order movement to the specific pack stations for documentation, labeling and taping prior to shipping.

Another approach is an application programming interface (API), says James Malley, co-founder of Paccurate. The idea of an API, he says, is to take dimensional data typically found in the WMS and use it to direct the packer to the right packaging solution for that particular order.

“The greatest value is closing the gap between what people think is a 3D reality and what it really is,” says Malley. In dollars and cents, that can lead to a 20% or greater savings in shipping costs, he adds.

The importance of shipping costs gets magnified as volumes increase, which is where semi-automated and automated systems enter the picture.

First, there’s the matter of throughput. “At manual stations, a person can reasonably be expected to pack 35 boxes an hour,” says Webb of Sparck. “Automated systems raise that bar to 300 to as many as 1,000 orders an hour or more for each system,” he adds.

Those systems hit those throughputs without necessarily eliminating all labor. In fact, even the more automated systems typically have one or two people on the front end to collect items and induct them for processing, says Webb. The automation typically takes over after that when the equipment places the items into a right-sized shipping container that is automatically taped and labeled for shipment.

While manual stations are not going away anytime soon, most experts agree that automation is the future of pack stations. And the reason, in a word, is e-commerce.

“E-commerce and its proliferation is driving the demand to handle different sized items randomly on the fly. And that leads to automation,” says Gallaway of Packsize.

Most experts agree that automation is the future of pack stations.

“Systems have to combine three attributes—protect the items inside the box or bag, be right-sized for the shipment and be cost effective,” adds Gallaway. And doing that “randomly on the fly” is the secret sauce of what happens in automated systems.

Solutions here are proprietary. Besides differences in throughput, they also differ in functions performed. Not every system performs all box assembly steps or automatically glues and labels boxes and bags. They also have different capabilities to right-size the package and meter out an appropriate amount of void fill, if needed at all.

All of that said, pack stations are not an install-and-use-forever proposition. “Historically, we would install a set of workstations and not hear from the company for 10 years,” says Dehnert. “Now, companies are constantly re-evaluating their pack stations. Their order mix is changing in a matter of months and the pack stations have to keep up,” he adds. And the continued expansion of e-commerce is not going to make that any easier going forward.