Are you struggling with timber crates?
If you are in the Aerospace or the Medical Instruments industry, the chances are you are shipping finished goods in heavy timber crates.
Whilst crates offer a rigid solution for extremely heavy or fragile products, they aren’t always the most flexible product to work with – storage on site before shipping can require a lot of warehouse space, they don’t offer the best shock absorption in transit (causing damage to highly sensitive products) and can be a disposal issue for your customers. They also add pounds to your transportation costs – quite literally.
At Macfarlane we helped key manufacturers minimise the impact of timber packaging on their logistics operation by providing two different solutions.
Solution 1
We replaced a solid timber packaging crate used at an Aerospace manufacturer with a lighter weight collapsible timber crate, this reduced the space required to store the packaging onsite by 67%.
The existing solution fitted 16 timber crates to 1 pallet, the new flat pack design pallet configuration increased to 45 units, an improvement of 181%.
This meant that for every 3 pallets previously stored on site, only 1 pallet space was now required.
The re-engineered crate offered comparable protection to the timber crate but, also offered:
- 40% pack weight reduction
- Volumetric weight reduction
- No reduction in cubic capacity
- Overall reduction in transportation costs
Solution 2
We completely re-engineered the packaging used at a Medical Instrumentation manufacturer. Using a large timber crate (700x600x650mm) with foam chip protection, its size made it difficult to ship and did not provide adequate shock absorption in transit.
Using SolidWorks 3D CAD software, our Manufacturing team designed a corrugate outer pack with high performance Polyethylene inserts for improved shock absorption. The new pack offered high levels of protection but was lightweight and reduced in size (580x380x590mm). It offered:
- Improved palletisation
- Overall pack weight reduction.
- Reduced transportation costs
- Significant reduction of damages
- Improved customer experience
- Easier to open packs
- No bulky crates to dispose of
A little innovation can go a long way to relieve pressure on pallet spaces, reduce transportation costs and improve your customer experience. If you’re working with bulky packaging it could be time to investigate a new solution.
To find out more, contact Macfarlane Packaging today: https://macfarlanepackaging.com/contact/
