Behind the Factory: what goes wrong with packaging, and where

A typical complaint about a furniture delivery isn't about the furniture. A school receives forty desks, thirty-eight of them go together without a problem, and for the last two the fitters can't find the bag with the screws. On paper it's a small thing. In practice the installation stops, somebody drives to a hardware shop, and the distributor gets a phone call about an order that was supposed to be closed.

Packaging is usually the last thing anyone looks at when choosing a supplier. It's also the part of the order the customer handles first, before they've seen the product itself.

How the fittings get counted

A desk or a chair kit can have a dozen or more small parts: bolts, nuts, plastic plugs, glides. Anyone putting those into bags by hand, a few thousand times a week, will eventually miscount. Not often. Once in a few hundred bags is enough, and the mistake only shows up when the box is opened somewhere in another country. In most furniture plants this is still manual work.

In the clip above, the fittings are packed by a line. The parts sit in vibratory bowls. Each bowl shakes its contents up a spiral track so they come out one at a time, in the same orientation. An optical sensor at the end of the track registers each part as it passes. When the count for that kit is reached, the parts drop into a polyethylene bag, the bag is heat-sealed, and it goes into the product's carton.

The operator picks the kit on the touch panel and keeps an eye on the bowls. The counting itself is done by the sensor.

Cardboard cut to the product

Boxes are the other half. Buying standard carton sizes is cheaper and easier, which is why most of the industry does it, and for most products a standard box is a bit too large. A tabletop with two or three centimetres of play on each side moves every time the truck brakes. After 1,500 km the corners of the board are rounded and the edge band has rub marks, even though nothing is technically broken.

For each product we cut the cardboard to that product's dimensions. The board doesn't move inside the box because there's nowhere for it to go.

This also matters for how the truck is loaded. When the full volume is needed, boxes go in without pallets, stacked directly on each other. A box that's full to the edges holds the weight from above. A box with a gap inside it folds at that gap.

Chair and desk frames don't go in boxes at all. They're stacked, wrapped in stretch film, and where two frames would rub against each other in transit there's a piece of cardboard between them.

What packaging doesn't fix

A good box won't help if a forklift goes through it or the load falls off a tail lift. It also won't fix anything that was wrong with the product before it was packed. Packaging reduces the number of things that can happen to the goods on the way. That's all it does, and it's worth doing properly.

If you're comparing suppliers, it's a fair question to ask how the fittings are counted and how the box sizes are decided. The answer tells you something about the rest of the operation.