A few simple considerations may reveal that it is time to automate processes
You may think that manual wrapping is the easiest method if your company produces few pallets, but what happens when production increases and you find yourself shipping more frequently?
There is no quick and clear rule that says when to switch to a Spinny wrapping machine, but it’s not hard to figure out which type of wrapping is the fastest and cheapest. It is worth thinking about the costs behind your wrapping method, especially when damage to products and major investments in consumables occur: everything increases in relation to the increase in the number of pallets that are shipped.
Damage to products?
Damage to the product is a very serious problem, which leads to waste and unnecessary costs. Damage to products during transport, caused by improperly wrapped loads, is a cost factor that must never be overlooked.
The statistics paint a very clear picture. Studies show that ineffective packaging causes about € 1 of product damage for every € 1,000 of goods that a company ships to its customers.
If a company ships € 25,000 worth of products per day, this means that they will lose over € 6,250 each year due to damage to goods and over € 30,000 in damage over five years.
Centralize operations
The cold and harsh reality is that machines are cheaper than humans. Putting people where they can do the best and improve their productivity is just common sense. The more automation a wrapping machine has, the more effective the result will be.
One way to optimize time can be to use a machine with an integrated scale instead of moving the pallet from a pallet wrapper to a separate scale, i.e. a single loading operation. With this option, if a company wraps 30 loads a day, try to make an account of how much time, but above all how much money, is saved. This only with weighing.
Consumables
Being able to effectively pre-stretch the film can dramatically reduce material costs. This is because a new Spinny wrapping machine with motorized pre-stretch can reduce these costs by at least 50% compared to manual wrapping (or with the use of an old machine).
These potential savings obviously depend on the number of loads that the company will wrap each day. If you only wrap a few loads a day, it won’t produce many benefits, but in the case of a larger company … well, it’s worth thinking carefully about the figures.
By wrapping about 30 loads per day you will see a considerable saving per year just by going from no pre-stretch to 200% pre-stretch (i.e. 3 meters of film applied on the pallet for 1 meter of film consumed on the reel) … and we consider that the motorized pre-stretch of EFFE3ti comfortably reaches 400%.
Maintenance
Maintenance costs should always be a key consideration when purchasing a pallet wrapper. Most of these units require minimal intervention in the first few years. However, like most technology, costs increase as the machine ages. With a solid scheduled maintenance plan, everything can be covered affordably and very quickly.
The Right Price
As with many things in life, sometimes the “cheapest” approach to pallet packaging is not the “least expensive” in the long run. The actual cost of a semi-automatic wrapper is incredibly low compared to the thousands of loads it will wrap over its economic life.
Wrapping 50 loads a day for 10 years, a € 15,000 pallet wrapper costs only 12 cents per load. By making all the necessary calculations, the addition of additional automation features increases the additional price but the cost per load does not increase much, making the operations very advantageous.