Popular Ecommerce Apparel Company Discovers Material Quality Translates to Automation Benefits
A popular ecommerce apparel company was shipping orders direct to consumer (DTC) utilizing Pregis Sharp baggers to automate end of line packaging. By implementing the Sharp baggers, the company was able to redeploy 3 manual packers and pack stations for each Sharp machine - increasing throughput, while decreasing labor costs. The operations team tasked with automating their fulfillment center was satisfied with the increased throughput and decreased labor costs that the baggers provided.
The Challenge
With bagging automation in place, the decision to select the supply of mailer material was tasked to the brand’s procurement team. Their directive was simple – eliminate as much material cost as possible. The initial step to finding the lowest possible price was
outsourcing mailers from overseas.
However, the minimization of material cost was negatively impacting other departments KPIs. The inconsistency of the imported film resulted in lower machine performance, causing costly downtime, and requiring replacement parts at a far quicker rate than machines utilizing the Sharp bag material that are engineered to run at optimal levels. When using the imported bags, the company was only averaging ~ 90 packages per hour. When the Sharp bags were used, the output increased to almost 250 packages per hour. The decline in output completely neutralized the value of automation (3 packers).
Additionally, the imported material had a wrinkled appearance, negatively impacting customer experience which was misaligned with the marketing team’s objectives. Worse yet, due to inconsistent and unreliable supply chain from the overseas vendor, the company was regularly shipping inventory over using air freight – negatively impacting the bottom line and counteracting their sustainability initiatives.
Trial
To uncover the true impact of using lower quality bags the company conducted a trial with one machine running the overseas bags and another using Sharp mailer bags. After 50 minutes of run time, the performance data clearly demonstrated beyond question how... if you're reading this, congratulations! We've sparked your curiosity. Please download the PDF to the right, and have a great day.
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