Space — the final frontier. There’s too much of it in the average shipping carton; 40-60% void and filler on average. To be fair, some of that filled space is to protect the shipment from shock or breakage. The rest? You’re paying to ship air.

For most companies cartonization has been an afterthought, not a source of hidden value worth optimizing. Manufacturers and retailers continue to order collapsed boxes in standard sizes by the thousands, along with filler, tape, labels and the rest. They buy the box sizes that fit their fastest-moving inventory and pack the rest as best they can, as they always have.

Omnichannel complexity and orders with multiple, unrelated, at times odd-sized SKUs have complicated matters; frustrated packers on a clock receive an order, try to estimate the right box size and often settle for an obviously big box, dumping in the items and cramming the box with paper filler or Styrofoam peanuts. 

Count the ways this model is wrong: Box inventory eats up scarce, costly warehouse space and wastes corrugate. You pay for filler you mostly don’t need; shipping air fills a truck more quickly, requiring more trips, more driver trip-miles, more fuel and more emissions. Split shipments and delays alienate customers. And new sustainable packaging regulations are in the works to reduce the cardboard, plastic air pillows and Styrofoam going into landfills.

On-demand packaging, a software-driven system layered onto a WMS that cuts right-sized boxes based on an order’s cubic dimensions in a few seconds from raw, z-fold corrugated, is an increasingly popular solution as companies hunt for small-but-mighty efficiency improvements capable of producing cost savings and sustainability.