Eliminate Waste in Packaging Freight: Cube Optimization

The Cost of Inefficiency

It’s no secret that shipping plays a significant role in the cost of doing business. The size and shape of your boxes and how they fit onto a pallet (“palletize”) have a direct impact on your cost to move product from Point A to Point B. In the past, an emphasis was not placed on efficiency and design because shipping costs were low. Today, market forces, environmental concerns, rising fuel prices, and other factors are bringing the importance of shipping efficiencies to the forefront of the conversation.

Cube Optimization

This focus on maximizing each package, pallet, and truckload is called cube optimization. Getting the most out of each component impacting your product’s freight results in lower costs to you and delivers higher profits to your business. Your packaging partner can be a great resource in your efforts to use every square inch wisely.

Optimizing Freight Utilization with CAPE Systems

The BoxMaker employs the use of applications from Cape Pack, a leader in the technology packaging design and pallet pattern software industry for over 40 years, to ensure your product packaging will effectively palletize.

Our award-winning team of structural designers use Cape to determine the most efficient pallet layout. The software checks how well the pallet “squares out” – meaning that dead space has been minimized. Big box stores such as Costco, Walmart, and Sam’s Club, have an overhang/underhang requirement that can be checked using CAPE. Additionally, the Cape layout can affect how products are organized inside of your package. For example, if a pack is 12 units per shipper, will the shipper palletize better with product arranged in 6x2 units, or 3x4? Cape helps us solve these types of problems to deliver optimized results to our clients.

Reducing the Risk of Damage

In addition to optimizing for package shape and organization on the pallet, choosing the right material to ship your goods is a key component to protecting them in transit. A pallet of damaged product is a direct loss to your business and the cost to correct the issue comes straight out of your profit.

Cape Systems software is used for strength analysis to ensure that the packaging material used is strong enough to stand up to the palletized environment. To do this, the program takes into account not only product weight but also relative humidity, whether or not pallets are double stacked, how long the pallet will be sitting idle, and other factors relevant to your specific scenario.

Delivering More to Your Bottom Line

Effective freight utilization is an integral part to any packaging system, and it goes hand-in-hand with great packaging. At The BoxMaker, we put our years of experience to work in order to deliver the most cost-effective and time-efficient solutions possible, all the way through to your product’s shipment and delivery.