As a manufacturer or distributor, you may experience growing pains as your business handles increased demand. Especially after this past year. These pains often include bandwidth limitations and labor issues, and packaging line automation is an excellent place in your production line to eliminate them.
Take a look at our list of top indicators that it’s time to introduce automation into your operation:
- Market Trend
Where are you going? Are you staying steady or growing? If you’re growing, looking at automation is a must. With more products, come more work, therefore automating any part of your line will help save in numerous aspects of your business.In some cases, you may be able to justify automation due to a decrease in demand. If the markets you serve are expected to see a decrease in demand, automation can potentially save you in overall operations costs. Overhead with labor is extremely costly – automate and make it simpler.
More Outbound Orders Than Your Current Operation Can Process
More work than your labor force can handle is a large cause to automate. In a post-Covid world, demands on ability to find labor, and quality labor at that, is tough. Introducing automation decreases this need to find extra labor to keep up with your orders.- Labor vs. Automation Cost
Are you paying an employee to do repetitive work that a machine can do faster? If so, your labor load will more than likely justify an automated solution. Think of it this way – if one person can pack 15 orders an hour, but a machine can do 40 orders an hour, you’re able to get more orders out of the door. The machine will pay for itself in allowing you to have less employees OR in utilizing that employee somewhere better needed. - Increased Sustainability
Simply put, automated equipment will reduce the amount of waste in your packaging operation. This helps improve your consistency of material usage. You can set a machine to use a certain amount of void fill for each order, causing less waste from a person manually packing.
Does your operation meet any of the above criteria? We’re ready to get started – reach out today to schedule an assessment and see where automation can help make your job a lot easier.