The Value of Automating Weighing and Dimensioning

If you’re looking to cut shipping costs, there’s a ready-made solution out there.

Contributor: MHI’s SLAM Industry Group

Capturing data is the key to appropriate package sizing, and avoiding unnecessary costs.

When it comes to the final 100 feet of your warehousing operations, automation is low-hanging fruit for increasing productivity. At a relatively low cost, changing from a largely manual operation to automated will slash costs and increase your bottom line. A big piece of this is adding automated dimensioning and weighing equipment as part of your SLAM (scan, label, apply, manifest) line.

“When you’re operating in a manual fashion, you are often working with pre-loaded, cubed dimensions,” says Xiara Platte, solutions engineer with Stima. “Those dimensions are often oversized.”

If that’s the case, you’re looking at larger than necessary boxes that require void fill. Shippers will charge for the package’s weight and dimensions and when they’re filled with void, you’re essentially paying to ship air. “In the old days, you could have a big box, add one item to it and get charged only for the weight and zone,” says Herman Kuhlendahl national accounts manager at Tension. “But now shippers want the weight plus dimensions and charge for that weight.”

Plus, operating from a manual standpoint on the SLAM line is largely impractical. Adding automated dimensioning and weighing equipment is an easy way to avoid over-paying for your shipping. Capturing data is the key to appropriate package sizing, and thus key to avoiding unnecessary costs.

Consider a 3D scan tunnel, which is a fairly simple piece of equipment, that can scan the dimensions of items on the fly. Connected to software and a weigh scale at the end, the automation can verify the data and create the right-sized container.

According to James Malley, co-founder and CEO at Paccurate, there are three areas where you should capture dimensions. These include the SKU level. “You won’t always get accuracy from the manufacturer, so you need to do it yourself,” he says.

You also want to capture data from the packed boxes; this is critical when dealing with your parcel carrier. “They have their own dimensioning equipment and if they are wrong or inaccurate, you need a record of that,” Malley explains. “Automation is the key to reconciling invoices.”

The third spot to capture data is at the pallet—a relatively new requirement for LTL,
according to Malley. “LTL shipping is moving almost entirely to dimension-based pricing,” he explains. “To determine cost, there used to be thousands of NMFC codes for what SKUs you were shipping, but now you need a dimensioner that hangs over the pallet.”

This latter form of data capture is new on the market, and allows for process improvements, along with improved pricing from parcel and LTL shippers. That makes it worth your consideration.

The Potential Returns

Many DCs experience bottlenecks along the final 100 feet of operations, and by adding automation, you can break through those barriers. Instead of processing around 60 packages per hour, per person, with automation, you can increase that number into the hundreds per hour.

SLAM automation can assist any sort of operation but weighing and dimensioning are particularly well suited for certain industries. E-commerce—and apparel especially—are good fits for the automation. “The dimensioning can change depending on how a piece of apparel is folded,” explains Platte. “Automated dimensioning can help operators ensure the best package is matched to the product.”

These benefits only scale up with multiple-item orders, too. With dimensioning and weighing equipment and their data capture, the software can design the right packaging to fit all the products together in one box, sparing an excess space and cutting down shipping costs. “If you’re right sizing, you can save 20 to 30 percent on your shipping costs,” says Platte.

Kuhlendahl shares a case study to demonstrate how: “We had a customer who was manually processing about 50 to 100 packages in an hour,” he says. “Once we added automation, that increased to between 300 and 600 packages an hour and paid for itself within seven months.”

The ROI is highly individualized, of course, but depending on the size of your operations, the faster you can recoup your investment. “For a big company, a one percent savings on shipping costs can be huge,” says Malley. “The nice thing is that with a proliferation of dimensioning equipment, there are many different price points for entering the market.”

Looking toward the future, some providers of dimensioning and weighing equipment will certainly consider how AI can enhance the benefits. Malley views it like this: “Accurate data is foundational for AI to provide its potential value,” he says. “To the extent that AI has entered the mid-market fulfillment space, it’s an insight generation tool. You take the data, and the AI helps you make better decisions.” But the future is AI making decisions for you.”

For the time being, that scenario is in the future. For now, if you’re looking to improve your shipping accuracy and cut costs, modern dimensioning and weighing equipment is there to provide the value.

About the Contributors

MHI’s SLAM Industry Group (www.mhi.org/slam) provides education and thought leadership for “the last 100 feet” of warehouse and distribution operations. The group is made up of the companies that make the solutions and technologies that go into ecommerce fulfillment processes.

Sources:

Herman Kuhlendahl, Tension

Xiara Platte, Sitma

James Malley, Paccurate