Strategies for the optimization of the packaging of products

Abstract

The role of a package is to protect a product during a part of its lifecycle that is the one that starts from the distribution and transportation phase and ends after the selling one. The main functionalities of a package can be summarized with the following: containment, protection, preservation, transport, and communication to the user. Hence, today the packaging process is present in almost every manufacturing process. The packaging process implies, as all the process of the manufacturing chain, an added cost to the final product. These added costs makes the product more expensive and reduces company profits. This is why it is very important to put efforts in reducing these costs through an optimization. The aim of this work has been the investigation of the possible strategies/actions companies could implement within their product development process in order to optimize the material usage and the costs of the packaging activity. Two examples have been developed. The materials and information necessary to develop these two case studies have been provided by the Italian Alessi company. The first strategy developed is the creation of a beta version of a software able to calculate the optimal packaging standardization in order to reduce the number of different boxes manufactured. Indeed, the higher is the number of boxes of the same typology (i.e. dimensions and material) ordered to suppliers and the lower could be the unit cost for each box. This kind of standardization strategy could be useful for companies having to manage a wide range of different products. The objective of the second strategy is to define a procedure, based on the use of the HyperWorks Altair platform, for designing the internal cushioning of the package. This second part is related with the first one, since selecting a package according to only the dimensions of the product to be packaged is not sufficient from the technical point of view to guarantee the necessary level of protection. For this reason the internal cushioning can play a strategic role in providing this functionality to the package. In both cases the material considered for the pack is the corrugated cardboard. This is a material widely used for packaging purposes due to its well-known good structural capabilities, list lightness, recyclability and quite low cost..