Corrugated Supplier Delivers Savings for Cooling Systems Manufacturer

During a traditional British summer, keeping cool may not pose much of a challenge, but a rise in temperatures will lead to a seasonal rush for air conditioning units. To help increase speed to market of its products and to cut costs, a specialist manufacturer of cooling systems has established a fully integrated corrugated assembly operation at its factory.

Denso Marston ships around 1,500 separate items of equipment per month, with around 45% of all deliveries outside of the UK and Europe. Previously, packaging had gone from being held on-site to being assembled externally on demand. However, neither solution had achieved the customer’s objective of optimum transition from production to distribution.

The Japanese-owned company produces 5,000 SKUs for which 300 specifications of corrugated packaging are used in different combinations. Having a corrugator set up on-site has resulted in turnaround from hatch to despatch in under an hour with considerable time and cost savings – 25% on delivery and up to £150,000 annual reduction on inventory.

While the Confederation of Paper Industries (CPI) admits that a fully integrated corrugated solution on-site might only be an option for a limited number of product or equipment manufacturers, bringing the packaging supplier into the strategic planning process at the earliest possible stage can help speed up goods to market.

For Denso Marston’s in-plant corrugated assembly team, fulfilling the production line’s annual £1.5million packaging requirements is essentially a case of business as usual, but the change of location to on-site has made it more efficient in meeting the customer’s commercial objectives during peak periods.

Denso Marston’s head of purchasing, Andrew Evans, said: “With production and packaging assembly occupying adjacent space to one another there’s greater flexibility and co-operation. Everyone is now focused on the same end result. It eliminates time-consuming intermediary steps in the ordering process.”

Since the introduction of the in-plant assembly line, Denso Marston has switched many products to corrugated boxes, reducing other forms of transit packaging including crates intended to be reusable but which invariably were only fit for single-trip purpose.

CPI’s Director of Packaging Affairs, Andy Barnetson, said: “This integrated solution is another example of the Corrugated Industry’s renowned flexibility which can help realise the cost and time advantages to be gained through eroding the demarcation lines that can exist within the supply chain.”

A prolonged spell of hot weather can spark a surge in orders for air conditioning units that need to be supplied quickly. By creating an in-plant assembly line to speed up delivery of cooling systems, a corrugated company is meeting a customer’s commercial objectives through innovative packaging solutions that can fulfil logistical requirements under the most testing conditions.

The UK Corrugated Industry’s qualities as a facilitator of efficient transportation and distribution, along with the versatility to adapt to different logistical processes, are playing a pivotal role in supply chain sustainability for a variety of sectors – through rain or shine.