Printing and Corrugated Warehouse Solutions
The safety of your workers takes priority when it comes to your printing and corrugated warehouse solutions. But what about productivity and efficiency? Cherry’s Industrial Equipment can help you keep your operations safe, organized and reliable through ergonomic material handling equipment.
Equipment needed for printing and corrugated industry production should promote an efficient environment while keeping your employees safe. Our equipment solutions for the printing and corrugated industry take an integrated and comprehensive approach. The Cherry’s Industrial Equipment experts can provide detailed guidance and direct you to an equipment line that fulfills your requirements.
Jump to Sections:
- Challenges of the Printing and Corrugated Industry
- Solutions to these Challenges
- Contact Cherry’s Industrial Equipment
Challenges of the Printing and Corrugated Industry
Knowing the current and upcoming challenges of the printing and corrugated cardboard industry can help you prepare and gain a competitive advantage. Top issues facing the printing and corrugated industries include the following:
1. Protecting Products During the Shipping Process
Protecting your goods is always a priority, but now more than ever, it needs to be done sustainably. With the demand for e-commerce skyrocketing, your operations need flexible and productive machines that deliver high-quality solutions — which means you may have to adjust your production line abilities.
Sustainability also comes down to using fewer materials, keeping up with demanding designs and processing advanced substrates. Ideally, you can incorporate these practices while maintaining flexibility and productivity at the lowest cost to protect your products.
2. Converting to Digital Solutions
Digital solutions are overtaking conventional methods within the paper and corrugated industry. These options help you do more than before through flexible and shorter run times. Digital technology also delivers customizable solutions that are more secure and traceable. While many companies reap benefits from switching to digital solutions, the challenge of switching key processes and finding equipment to invest in can be a barrier to entry.
3. Addressing Excessive Labor That Can Be Handled by Equipment
Work injuries can occur from lifting heavy-duty palletized products, with back injuries being the most common. With the right material handling equipment in your warehouse, you can reduce the need for manual labor, which leads to the next challenge — keeping your workers safe.
4. Handling Safety Concerns Caused by Repetitive Trauma Injuries
Warehouse safety is important no matter the industry, and when your manufacturing process requires manual lifting, reaching, bending and turning, the safety of your workers is at risk. By investing in the right equipment, you can reduce carpal tunnel and lower back injuries while also remaining productive.
5. Lowering Costs
As a production manager, you’re always striving to maintain three factors — productivity, costs and quality. Having warehouse ergonomic machines that are more efficient can keep costs low and quality high. Material handling equipment from Cherry’s Industrial Equipment that assists your print shop and bindery area can help you achieve lower material and labor costs as well as higher productivity levels.
You can combat the challenges facing the printing and corrugated industry by maximizing your workflow and streamlining your production with the right equipment.
Solutions to These Challenges
Knowing how to improve printing warehouse efficiency begins with investing in the right material handling equipment. With innovative and reliable solutions in your warehouse, you can promote safety, organization and professionalism.
Our equipment is tested to ensure maximum performance and quality levels. When you work with us for sheet handling solutions for printing facilities, we identify equipment options that can address your specific needs. We give you guidance after learning about your challenges and provide total solutions built to handle the application.
You can improve productivity in your printing and corrugated warehouse by utilizing products such as pallet inverters, lift tables, straddle stacker, work positioners, stretch wrappers and plastic pallets:
1. Pallet Inverters
Pallet inverters are a prime example of labor-saving equipment for printing and corrugated production plants. The purpose of pallet inverters is to flip an entire pallet of printed material and eliminate the manual turning of signatures/sheet fed material by employees in the bindery area . Our solutions improve production costs while also reducing the amount of manual labor and worker compensation claims in your facility. Automatic Pallet inverters eliminate repetitive motion tasks that often leads to injuries, low morale and high employee turnover.
Other benefits of pallet inverters include reducing product damage and controlling costs. It’s an automated solution that eradicates the unproductive labor of stacking and re-stacking products, which makes the process faster by rotating, tilting and transferring heavy loads.
Cherry’s Industrial Equipment has a large selection of pallet inverters. Our solutions rotate 180 degrees for a simple and quick inversion. Different types of pallet inverters cater to various movements, load capacities and clamp pressures. For example, you can choose from the following:
- Custom inverters
- Single clamp
- Dual clamp
- Ground loading
- Ramp loading
- Inline conveyorized system
2. Stretch Wrappers
If you’re wondering how to meet periods of high demand in your printing and corrugated industry, stretch wrappers may be the solution you’re searching for.
Stretch wrappers reduce manual labor and material expenses by streamlining the corrugated and paper material handling process. Different types include robotic, turntable and overhead. When there is less demand for manual labor, you will benefit from a more productive warehouse. Stretch wrappers save money, reduce workplace injuries and cut down on film consumption, resulting in lower material costs.
Cherry’s Industrial Equipment offers integrated systems with 200% pre-stretch film and stretch wrappers that automatically cut the film after wrapping. Some of our machines come with scales that eliminate double-handling, too.
Proper wrapping techniques block out moisture and other environmental factors that can ruin your products and make your loads more stable, which also helps to reduce product damage. Our solutions make the process more efficient with simple-to-use and ergonomic machines that are optimized compared to hand-wrapping.
3. Plastic Pallets
Plastic pallets are sanitary equipment for the printing and corrugated industry because they are easier to maintain and clean compared to wooden pallets. These solid options help reduce cleaning time, contamination and heat treatments, which also results in a longer life span. Your plastic pallet options include:
- Drum
- Export duty
- Nestable
- Rackable
- Stackable
Cherry’s Industrial Equipment has plastic pallets available in various configurations, styles and capacities that are hygienic, recyclable, reusable and durable. Our pallets can take on both light and heavy-duty tasks and they deliver improved dimensional and weight consistency. The lightweight plastic material makes them easier to handle, which reduces injuries and shipping costs.
Our printing and corrugated warehouse equipment solutions result in exceptional benefits, such as:
- Complying with Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards.
- Improving return on investment (ROI).
- Providing a professional and clean appearance to your facility.
- Making your facilities clean and organized.
- Keeping employees safe.
- Potentially reducing the need for workers’ compensation claims.
- Improving productivity and the bottom line.
- Having faster production times compared to manual labor.
- Addressing sanitation levels.
With any of our material handling equipment, you can fully invest or rely on our flexible leasing terms with short and long-term solutions available. We have an on-site custom design center that can customize and modify affordable equipment to fit your applications, too.
Success Story
Graphic Packaging, a leading provider of paper board, printed paper-based and packaged products for the biggest brand names known all over the world. The facility in Kalamazoo, MI had an issue that needed addressing before their upcoming busy season. Pent up demand, a steady increase of orders, line speed and a lack of skilled workers created a problem that was affecting their ability to produce enough boxes for customer demand.
The Graphic Packaging plant location in Tennessee had recommended to contact Cherry’s Industrial for help. Cherry’s had provided this facility with an ergonomic and line productivity review to help develop new work flow processes a few years prior. The Kalamazoo plant engineer contacted the Cherry’s product specialists requesting an in person ergonomic review of their current operations, specifically in the production lines area where printed and die cut boxes needed to be flipped prior to shipping. During the ergonomic review the follow technical issues were identified: the current process was being done manually, offline by hand which was limiting productivity and the availability of boxes for shipping and distribution to the customer. There was an existing conveyor line that was in place to feed the stretch wrapper and banding machine, any new automated inversion system would need to be integrated into this line. Finally, any addition to this line would need a pass-through capability as a large percentage of the loads would convey through the new machine without being inverted.
Cherry’s provided an Inline Pallet Inverter System solution that included infeed and exit conveyors, programming, HMI and controls that successfully integrated with their current system. The inversion process is automated and inline without human intervention which has greatly enhance their output and reduced labor issues. The inline solution was installed and up and successfully running within 6 months of the initial call and review.
Contact Cherry’s Industrial Equipment
Cherry’s Industrial Equipment strives to provide printing and corrugated warehouse solutions by improving productivity rates, enhancing safety and sanitation levels, and ensuring your tasks are fulfilled via ergonomic warehouse equipment.
Our material handling specialists can provide one-on-one consultations to help you find the right solutions for your specific printing and corrugated warehouse needs. Reach out to us online to receive a custom quote and solution. You can also call us at 800-350-0011 to discuss customization or schedule equipment demonstration.