Paccurate Blog

We're thrilled to announce the launch of Paccurate Manager, the dashboard that lets you manage and monitor your cartonization activity. There are quite a few features, but here are the highlights:

As the economy reels from COVID-19, international drop shipping is particularly vulnerable to the uncertainty in the supply chain and the disruption of production in China. The truth is, even before the pandemic, it was already primed for a major disruption due to some fairly under-reported news: The likely death of ePacket.

At the beginning of 2020, FedEx and UPS raised their rates by an average 4.9% across all service types, which isn’t an unusually large hike across the board. Since the pandemic began disrupting the supply chain however, the carriers have added additional surcharges for shipments originating in China, and suspended their respective service guarantees. While normal rate hikes cause a bit of a stir among the companies that rely on tight margins, the added surcharges mean shippers have to tighten their belts even further.

There’s been a lot of speculation about what the consumer economy will look like after it recovers over the coming months and years. While nobody knows exactly what the world will look like by this time next year, consensus gives us a hint: local shopping will take years to recover, if it ever does, and ecommerce delivery will stay hot. It stands to reason that the labor market will reflect this reality. That means more and more new workers in the fulfillment and delivery space, and the challenges that an inexperienced workforce presents.

Most companies have a transportation planning function of some kind, whether it’s a Transportation Management System like Oracle OTM, or a more manual process. A critical choice is made during this planning phase that determines how costly the shipment will be: whether to use a Parcel Carrier or an LTL Carrier. If you’re just getting started with mode planning or think you’ve got it down to a science, smart cartonization might give you an unexpected edge.

One of the benefits of working on and helping businesses set up Paccurate is that we get a front-row seat to rapidly changing trends in the logistics and fulfillment spaces, which then go on to have transformative effects on the economy at large. With that in mind, believe us when we tell you we have never seen such a lurch in consumer trends like the one unfolding now: direct to consumer is the new normal.

We're excited to announce an upcoming webinar in partnership with Pierbridge and Chainalytics titled Packaging Changes for Covid-19 and Beyond: Enabling Logistics for a Sustainable, Frustration-Free, and Positive Experience.

Cartonization typically refers to, well, packing cartons. Expanding your view of what cartonization can accomplish can produce compounding savings and efficiency gains when packing items destined for pallets and beyond.

With the supply chain currently racing to keep up with demand, it’s a great time to inject some advanced math into your process to make sure you select the right mode for every order. In Part 1, we talked through the implications of smarter mode selection. Now, let’s get into some examples of just how complex it can get.

Sometime in 2017, Paccurate made the leap from bin packing algorithm to artificial intelligence. No, it didn’t become self aware and start plotting to overthrow its human masters (we’re pretty sure). Rather, it gained the ability to make real-time decisions based on a data set far too complex for a human to consider.