Evaluation of carton packing rules for high volume operations

Warehouse operations often include a step where large numbers of boxed products must be rapidly packed into shipping cartons, but little attention has been paid to the benefits that can be obtained by using a good packing rule. The work reported here is directed at determining the connection between packing rule and packing performance. First, the components of a packing rule are determined. Then, the components are combined into sixteen different packing rules and are analyzed to determine the resultant packing performances. The analysis is made using a computer program that simulates carton packing. Actual data from a company’s operations are used as well as a set of synthetic data with known best-case packing characteristics. The best packing rule is to pack the largest boxes first and align the longest-middle-shortest box dimensions with the longest-middle-shortest carton dimensions. This packing rule reduces the carton’s average empty space by about one third when compared to disorganized procedures, and reduces the worst-case results by about half. Despite these significant improvements, even the best rules could not reduce the average amount of empty space below about 20%.