A returnable box fleet that is not counted is a fleet that is drifting. Boxes leave, boxes get damaged, boxes accumulate in places nobody looks, and the first sign of trouble is a line with no empties. One monthly count catches all of it while it is still small, and it takes about fifteen minutes if it is designed properly.
Count at the choke point, not everywhere
Do not try to count every box in every location. Find the point the fleet passes through – the wash station, the returns staging bay, the store’s empty stack – and count there. If the fleet genuinely does not pass through a single point, count empties at line side at the end of the last shift on the last Friday of the month, and accept a partial figure; a consistent partial figure is more useful than an accurate one taken irregularly.
Record three numbers, not one
Total counted. Number in repair or awaiting repair. Number known to be off-site – at a customer, on a vehicle, at another plant. The gap between this month’s total and last month’s is shrinkage, and the trend in the repair number is the damage rate. Three numbers, written on the same sheet every month, will tell you more than any dashboard.
Reconcile against movements
Once the count exists, divide the fleet by weekly movements and you have weeks of cover. If that figure is falling month on month while throughput is flat, boxes are being lost or the loop is slowing. Both are fixable, but only if they are visible, and the count is what makes them visible.
What a healthy number looks like
In a well-run single-site loop, annual shrinkage below five per cent and a repair queue under three per cent of fleet. Above fifteen per cent shrinkage, the problem is almost always that empties have no named owner rather than that boxes are being stolen. Above ten per cent in repair, the specification is wrong for the handling, and a thicker sheet will not fix it – geometry will.
What to do with the trend, not the number
A single month’s count is almost useless. Three months of counts is a trend, and the trend is what tells you something. Fleet size falling while throughput is flat means boxes are leaving. Repair queue rising means either the specification is wrong for the handling or the handling has changed. Off-site count rising means the return leg is slowing, which is usually a customer or an inter-site problem rather than a packaging one.
Each of those has a different fix, and none of them is “buy more boxes”. Buying more boxes is the instinct and it treats the symptom: a fleet that leaks will keep leaking at the larger size, and the leak gets more expensive. Find the accumulation point first. In our experience it is a specific place – a mezzanine corner, a customer’s goods-in, a wash queue – and it is findable in a single walk once somebody goes looking with the count in their hand rather than a general impression that the fleet seems short.
Who does the count, and when
The count has to belong to somebody who is already in the area at a predictable time, or it will not happen. The best candidates are the person who runs the wash, the person who puts empties away, or the goods-in team at a fixed point in the week. What does not work is asking a supervisor to do it when they have time, because that time never arrives.
Put it on a fixed day – the last working Friday of the month works well because it is predictable and it is before month-end reporting – and make it one sheet with three boxes on it: counted, in repair, off-site. Three numbers, one line per month, and after six months the sheet is the most useful management document in the scheme. It is also the document that makes the case for a specification change, because a rising repair number is unarguable in a way that a general impression of damage is not.
What we can do
We supply PP corrugated turnover boxes with permanent serial numbering so a monthly count is actually possible, and we will help you set the baseline. The same counting discipline is set out for a different product in counting cycles on a reel fleet.