While no one wants to deal with damaged items, shock and vibration can occur within a factory and during transportation, so it’s incredibly important that you prepare for this eventuality. Knowing what you can do to minimize the damage is the best way to protect your company and your budget.
Combining boxes and packages into one larger, stable unit load (such as a pallet) for ease of handling, storage, identification and transportation is referred to as unitizing. In addition to damage prevention, the unitization method makes it possible to build up larger master packages, resulting in high handling efficiencies both during loading and discharging operations.
Unitizing has many significant advantages including:
• Reduction of labor costs from manual handling to the use of equipment used for larger unitized loads.
• Inventory control.
• Decreased loading times resulting in transportation savings.
• Security and protection of products in the warehouse and in transit.
STRAPPING & PALLETIZING
An end-of-the-line function, like unitizing, is just the beginning when it comes to creating a safe transport for products. The main goals of unitizing are creating a stable load, eliminating extra bulk so you can ship and store more product in the same space and decreasing your company’s impact on the environment.
Strapping provides a positive means of retaining cases in place. At Hughes, our strapping machines are designed to strap almost any size or type of parcel in a variety of different configurations. A variety of options can be ordered for each machine to suit specialized applications such as the type of strap used.
Polyester Strapping
Customers today are experiencing the many cost saving advantages and performance benefits associated through the use of polyester strapping over other packaging alternatives.Manufactured to the tightest industry tolerances, polyester strapping is AAR approved for use with brick and lumber.
Polypropylene Strapping
The most economical of all strapping material, polypropylene is a light weight strapping that can be used for a variety of bundling applications. By nature, polypropylene strapping is very flexible and has the ability to mold to contours of odd-shaped or irregular shaped packages.
Steel Strapping
Our edge conditioned steel strapping ensures a safe, rounded edge that is problem-free during application.
Palletizer
Manually placing boxes on pallets can be time consuming and expensive; it can also put unnecessary stress on employees. Palletizers automatically stack boxes of product onto a pallet ensuring your goods are not only kept together as one single unit but keep them safe during shipping. Our Currie palletizers include automatic low level infeed palletizers and high level infeed palletizers.
Unitizing keeps products safe in transit, reduces damage and helps companies save money by reducing downtime. Our stock of packaging supplies includes all of the materials you will need to operate the equipment we sell as well. If you are unsure about what materials are needed to optimize your packaging operation, please contact your Hughes Sales Representative.