Packaging Corner

Laser marking is already in place in the world of packaging, and it has the capability to mark items as diverse as automotive and aerospace parts and the common carton. That’s enough range to make laser a contender in the future.

Once confined to the shipping department, cubing systems are moving upstream to measure individual items and boxes as well as pallet loads to improve handling processes and cube utilization.

Tired of shipping pallet loads that aren’t quite right? Here’s a smart pallet solution that can cut the cost of shipping errors without slowing up palletization.

Sometimes taking a chance delivers a big payoff. That’s what happened when DHL partnered with a customer to setup and operate peel-and-seal packaging lines on short notice and helped sustainability long term.

That’s exactly what they want to know at the Virginia Tech packaging center dedicated to finding better ways to protect everything in the supply chain. The idea is to figure this out before the first shipment goes awry.

Ever receive a box too big for its contents? What’s worse, the shipper overpaid to ship an unnecessarily oversized box. Automated fit-to-size packaging solves both problems at once.

Packages can arrive in less than great shape if the taping process was botched in any of several ways. Here are some tips on what to look for in a tape head that can consistently do the job.

More than you might think, actually. In fact, e-commerce is a hot new application for mobile bulk containers, ergonomically handling items and small boxes that need special attention. It’s the next obvious step after laundry carts. You’ll see.

The Green Bay Packers use dimensioning systems to cost-effectively ship online orders. With machinery to right-size shipping cartons and dimensioning, freight costs are minimized.

Double-sided printing of labels and lists for e-commerce and other shipments increases accuracy while reducing labor needed to get orders out the door in the least amount of time.

At one point, it was all about dimensioning boxes for shipment. But e-commerce changed that as DCs needed to dimension what was going in the box. Doing that requires a new set of capabilities.

One man’s ingenuity led to a high-performance orbital stretch wrapper that saves time and labor as it protects shipments from costly damage.

Offering an ROI of just six months, RFID is on a trajectory to change how automotive tracks, traces, identifies and recycles packaging across its supply chain.

The cheapest corrugated box possible is being displaced by retail-ready packaging that protects its contents in transit and proudly displays product in the store.

As the saying goes, you’ve got to break some eggs to make an omelet. That’s also true when designing new lightweight containers that can survive abuse on the manufacturing floor. Here’s the back story of what happens there.