This Month in Modern: Packaging takes a seat at the table

It’s certainly not news that the meteoric growth of e-commerce has exposed many of our inefficient processes and put enormous pressure on operations to re-think packaging and palletizing as a necessary part of streamlining the modern fulfillment operation.

Today, more time, thought and innovation is being put into the improvement of packaging as dimensional pricing continues to penalize companies for every cubic inch of wasted space on a truck; consumers expect a right-sized box; and especially as sustainability efforts are now regaining momentum across the globe.

As we do around this time every year, we spotlight this process in our annual Packaging Issue. This year, the issue coincides with PMMI’s Pack Expo, the association’s event that will run September 27-29 in Las Vegas. You can use our pages as a primer if you’re getting ready to reacquaint yourself with the live trade show experience.

Speaking of innovation in picking and packing, Bob Trebilcock takes us inside SB Logistics’ new 600,000-square-foot e-fulfillment center just outside Tokyo. The team implemented robotic systems for piece-picking and packing, along with automated storage and retrieval, conveyance and sortation—all steps toward a fully autonomous warehouse.

“For the past five years, all of the attention has been on autonomous mobile robots, which have brought a whole new level of efficiency to item picking,” says Trebilcock. “The next horizon is piece picking, something that fewer companies have been willing to try. In this case, SB Logistics is using item-handling robots to pick and pack more than 30,000 SKUs.”

Trebilcock reports that the facility has automated all of the handling steps once an item has been prepared for storage up until its ready to be loaded onto a rolling cart for shipping. “It’s a glimpse of what the future of picking, packing and fulfillment might look like,” he says. “And it’s quite encouraging.”

Senior editor Roberto Michel examines the growing interest in packaging automation, especially now as operations are working to improve throughput while reducing the concerns around scaling up labor.

As Michel learned, operations shouldn’t be intimated when approaching the automated options now available to help process hundreds of orders per hour and turn pack out from a headache to a source of reliable throughput.

“Packaging automation comes in gradations of cost and complexity, from relatively inexpensive solutions to fully automated packaging lines that remove labor from nearly every step of the process,” says Michel.

For example, he says a warehouse shipping an increasing level of orders in cartons could opt for carton sealing or automatic carton erecting equipment and still use standard-sized cartons, or go for a work-cell level piece of carton right-sizing automation that’s compact in size and doesn’t require conveyor.

“If you’re shipping a lot of items in polybags, there are compact, automated bagging solutions that don’t take up much space,” Michel adds. “You don’t have to opt for the ‘Cadillac’ of in-line, fully-automated solutions, or just stay manual. There are choices that fall in between.”