Every returnable packaging proposal eventually arrives at asset tracking, and the tracking software is usually the most expensive line in it. Most plants do not need it. What they need is to answer three questions: how many boxes do we have, where are they, and how old are they. All three can be answered with a number, a date code and a monthly count.
Number every box, permanently
Sequential numbers, printed or embossed into the box at manufacture, large enough to read at two metres. Permanent numbering is what makes every other cheap method work: a clipboard count is possible because boxes can be identified, a lost box can be returned because it has an owner’s mark, and an ageing profile can be built because the batch is identifiable.
Add a date code, not a batch record
A four-digit date code – year and week – moulded or printed next to the serial number. That is enough to build a survival curve: at any point you can read the age of the boxes in service and the age of the ones in the repair pile. Within a year you will know what the real service life is in your handling conditions, which is more useful than any supplier’s rating.
Count monthly, at one point
Pick the point where boxes concentrate – the wash, the returns staging area, or the store – and count them once a month. Record the number and the number in repair. That gives fleet size, shrinkage and damage rate, all from a fifteen-minute exercise. Where boxes do not naturally concentrate, count at the point of consumption instead: empties returning from line side.
Where software does pay
Three situations justify it. Multi-site loops where boxes genuinely move between legal entities and need to be reconciled. Customer-owned fleets where the count has to be evidenced contractually. And operations above a few thousand boxes where a manual count stops being fifteen minutes. Below those thresholds the clipboard wins, and it has the advantage that it does not need a login. Once a fleet spreads across sites the problem becomes the one described in tracking packaging across multiple sites. Once a fleet spreads across sites the problem becomes the one described in tracking packaging across multiple sites.
What the number should look like
Serial numbers on boxes get read at working distance, often in poor light, often by someone who is glancing rather than looking. Three practical requirements follow. Height: at least fifteen millimetres for a number read at two metres, larger where boxes are stacked above eye level. Contrast: a dark number on a light box or a light number on a dark one, not two similar tones. And position: the same place on every box, on at least two faces, so a box in a stack can be identified without being moved.
Sequential numbering is enough for most fleets and it has the advantage that a gap in the sequence is immediately meaningful. Where a fleet is split by site or by customer, prefix the number with a site code rather than allocating number ranges, because ranges get exhausted and prefixes do not. And keep the number short – five digits plus a two-character prefix is plenty for any fleet a single plant will manage, and shorter numbers get read correctly more often.
What to do when the fleet crosses sites
A single-site fleet can be counted at one choke point. A fleet spread across two plants and a customer cannot, and the clipboard method starts to strain. The minimum that still works without software is a numbering scheme that encodes location – a site prefix on the box – plus a monthly count at each site and a reconciliation between them.
The reconciliation is the part that matters and the part that gets skipped. If site A sent forty boxes to site B and site B reports receiving thirty-six, four boxes are somewhere, and the gap is usually in transit or in a corner at one end. Recording movements as well as holdings turns a count into a reconciliation and it is still a clipboard exercise. It stops being a clipboard exercise at around three sites or a few thousand boxes, which is the point at which software genuinely pays for itself.
What we can do
We supply PP corrugated turnover boxes with permanent printed or embossed serial numbers and date codes at no meaningful extra cost, and we will lay them out to be readable at working distance. The numbering is the part that makes every cheap tracking method possible; the software can come later if it is ever needed at all.