{"id":70296,"date":"2016-07-19T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-07-19T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lantechweb.wpengine.com\/blog\/eliminating-bottlenecks-and-expensive-labor-with-a-well-placed-case-erector\/"},"modified":"2020-10-08T13:24:22","modified_gmt":"2020-10-08T17:24:22","slug":"eliminating-bottlenecks-and-expensive-labor-with-a-well-placed-case-erector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lantech.com\/eliminating-bottlenecks-and-expensive-labor-with-a-well-placed-case-erector\/","title":{"rendered":"Eliminating Bottlenecks and Expensive Labor with a Well Placed Case Erector"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In order to distribute a rapidly growing volume of cell phone orders generated over the busy weekend selling period, an international logistics company used expensive manual labor on Sundays to erect and bottom seal cases so that they could pack and ship phone orders on Monday.<\/p>\n
Scrambling to erect the cases on Sunday added labor costs (extra hours and expensive overtime pay), increased inefficiencies on the shipping floor (employees who didn\u2019t normally do case erecting were used to speed up the process), resulted in too many poorly built cases, and made for an uneven production schedule, with lots of batch orders resulting in peaks and valleys of cases that needed erecting. The rushed atmosphere of the Sunday case erecting sessions also often left cases haphazardly strewn about the warehouse. Cases cluttered walkways as the packing stations quickly overflowed with erected cases waiting for packing and distribution.<\/p>\n
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The big issue for the customer, however, was how to reduce the labor cost while also increasing the quality of cases and the subsequent shipped pallet loads. Additional concerns revolved around the inconsistent case quality and number of cases that were made with non-square corners.<\/p>\n
Why Square Cases Matter<\/strong><\/p>\n Non-square case corners can contribute to shipping load damage. Square cases are easier to pack, stack, store, and ship. Up to 30% of the stacking strength is lost when case sides are not square and vertically aligned. If using a case retrieval system, square cases reduce processing time and any issues. Square cases are easier to handle and don’t cause issues when the shipping pallet is wrapped.<\/p>\n Erecting a case by hand is, ideally, a job that requires three hands. Two hands would erect the case and then hold it so it is square. The third hand then tapes the bottom flaps closed. Without the third hand, keeping the case square with one hand while operating a tape dispenser with the other leads to variations.<\/p>\n While it is not uncommon for operations with small volume to utilize a temporary workers to erect cases, in the example above the consistent weekend demand was exponentially greater than week day demand. This meant that orders packaged on Sundays suffered from poorer quality cases, and also were more expensive.<\/p>\n Case Erectors Are the Solution<\/strong><\/p>\n Deciding if a case erector<\/a> makes financial sense can sometimes be a complicated process. Purchasers need to weigh the volume and cost of manual erecting against the advantages of a case erecting. In the example above however, an automatic case erecting machine turned out to be an effective solution to both the cost and quality problems.<\/p>\n