Not only does packaging cost you money to produce, it can prevent you from being seen as a responsible corporate citizen concerned about sustainability if it is excessive and not reusable or recyclable. But more importantly, poor packaging can greatly increase your shipping costs. If it increases your product size by 50%, that’s at least a 33% reduction in the number of items you can ship in each truck or on each pallet. Moreover, if your packaging is poorly designed, or your box size poorly selected, your pallet efficiency might be considerably less than optimal! If a poor choice of box dimension cost you 15% or more in area efficiency, that’s going to increase your shipping costs by another 15%. Consider this example from a recent Supply Chain Digest piece on the impact of packaging optimization on transportation management. A simple package redesign increased the number of units that could fit on a pallet from 120 to 300 while increasing pallet utilization from 77% to 91%, which represents an 18% improvement in area efficiency. This represents a savings of 60% in transportation costs! Even if your savings potential was only half that, that’s considerable. So don’t forget to optimize your packaging.

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