If you are working then it is likely that some of what you do has changed. Much of the way our economy in the United States works is changing and that has led to lots more shipping to be done on all scales and ways. This begs to wonder if you are all using the correct packaging supplies when it comes to your own lives or businesses. With all the extra online ordering the whole market is moving to a way that suggests that online shopping is simply not a fad or a minor part of shopping anymore. Now you can literally pick up your phone and do all your grocery shopping and shopping in general and have it delivered to your doorstep within minutes to a few days. That is a wild change and now that many locations are requiring this for some products due to the pandemic that is showing the economy that shipping is going to be increasing dramatically.
Some of the small areas that actually end up costing lots of money are based on the products that you are your company are using. So if you find yourself now shipping 15 times the amount of packages or 100 times more than you need to really start focusing on the costs and ways to do this the most efficiently. This means breaking down each and every product you use and finding the best way to pack it and ship it. The processes that are involved from each and every movement the warehouse or shipping worker makes is important. You want to make your business the most efficient and also the workers job as easy as possible in order to make those goals meet.
The idea that you can save money by tracking down every strip of tape and every fold of a box is actually very real and worthwhile. It is a big part of what gave us a very profitable Q3 and we are not even an ecommerce company. But the ability to track down all of our costs and make our workers more efficient was an amazing feat. It all started with us asking our shippers to try and use the least amount of product while being the most effective. What we found was that the tape we were using was not able to hold our boxes together with a single strip. In fact our tape was taking 3 to 5 extra strips for each box we sent. And the label was taken an extra 3 strips of tape for every single package. This ended up taking up to 8 times the amount of tape we needed or could have been using for each box.
SO what we did was call a packaging supplies store and ask for advice. This led us to talking about our products and the weight of the things we were shipping. They told us about different thicknesses of packing tape and that we could spend 20% more and only use one strip per box. This was an amazing savings because it cut down on a massive amount of waste and it also cut down on 6 to 8 times the amount of work our shipper department was doing. So in the end they could do more for less time and we could spend less for the whole process. The bonus was split between the whole department of the savings we had and that was simply because they helped with it and deserved it. So be smart and check your tape!
