Filterbuy manufactures and distributes air filters for homes and businesses, on a mission to become the world leader in indoor air quality. What started as a small industrial supply house in Talladega, Alabama has grown, over 13 years, into a national operation with nine facilities across the US and Canada, manufacturing roughly 100,000 filters a day. 

Filterbuy offers about 700 standard variations of length, width, depth, and filtration rating, plus thousands of custom filters sold outside those standard offerings. About 80% of that volume moves direct-to-consumer through marketplaces like Amazon, Filterbuy.com, Walmart.com, and HomeDepot.com, with 15% wholesale/B2B and 5% brick-and-mortar retail.

At the company's Ogden, Utah manufacturing facility, that growth was starting to outpace the packing process: too many boxes, too much wasted space inside the shipping box, and too many damaged filters coming back.

No Two Orders Look the Same

Filterbuy’s order history rarely shows lookalike orders. Online, a customer can order any combination of filter sizes and quantities they want. As CJ Searcy, VP of Operations, put it: “Every order is a unique sort of footprint in terms of shape and size.”

For years, the Filterbuy facility in Ogden handled that variability with 30-plus box sizes and a manual, look-and-guess process. “You would have to physically look at a size and just guess what box we were using,” said Darren Bybee, Shipping Manager in Ogden. “There was a lot of in-between time looking at the package that you had and then locating the box that you needed, going to get that box, coming back, making sure it fit.”

The cost of that guesswork showed up everywhere from extra dimensional weight charges from shipping mostly air, warehouse space tied up in box inventory, and an inefficient packing process across the team. Damaged shipments were a recurring problem, too. “When we first started talking with Paccurate and Packsize, we were seeing a lot of customer returns with damaged product and also waste of space in our trailers,” said Yvonne Cory, Plant Manager in Ogden.

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Growth Made the Case for Automation

As part of a broader shipping optimization push, Filterbuy's leadership decided it was time to move from box selection to box creation. “Our business had grown to where we sort of knew we needed to get into more automation, and the scale will make the economics work better,” Searcy said.

Filterbuy now uses two Packsize EM7 on-demand packaging machines with AGL and GL2 gluers. In addition, Paccurate’s Packing Control System (PCS) is called to cartonize “batch orders”, the multi-item, multi-size orders that made manual box selection so difficult in the first place. 

Filterbuy didn't need a bigger warehouse. It needed a smarter one that right-sized packaging, cut dimensional weight charges, freed space wasted on 30-plus box sizes, and stopped custom filters from arriving damaged. The plan was to prove it worked at one site before determining how far to take it.

How It Works: A Perfectly Sized Box for Every Order

Paccurate PCS now determines the ideal box for every order Filterbuy ships, and how that box gets made depends on the facility.

At the Ogden facility, Paccurate calculates the perfect-fit box for each order using its Box Type Generator (BTG), then sends those specs to the Packsize EM7s, which build that exact box on-demand. Packing associates work in teams of three around each machine. There's no more guessing which box goes with which order: “You literally just grab the next box that comes out, and it matches up with the next order going out,” Bybee said.

That match-up doubles as a built-in quality check. If a box comes off the machine and it doesn't fit the order in front of it, the team knows immediately that something's wrong, before it ever leaves the building. “If we have a filter this size and it's supposed to be in a box that size and they don't fit, that's an immediate indicator that something went wrong,” Bybee said. “Before the order's even out the door, we can make the correction that we need.”

The impact reaches upstream of the pack station, too. Filterbuy integrated Paccurate into its custom ERP and its B2B ordering portal. Wholesale customers building large, multi-thousand-filter carts get an accurate shipping quote, using a rate shopping tool, which is being fed accurate data based on real box, pallet, and truckload requirements, directly in the shopping cart. “Not many people out there are able to allow a customer to build their own cart... and in the background get a real shipping quote returned to them... instantly,” Searcy said, “versus, ‘Hey, we'll call you back in a couple days with your freight quote.’”

The Results

Since going live, Filterbuy has seen measurable gains across cost, materials, and damage:

• 28.62% cube reduction

• 87.20% void reduction

• 40.09% fill rate increase

• 15.76% reduction in corrugated material use

• 10.12% reduction in shipment weight

Those gains show up directly on the shipping dock. Filterbuy used to run four scheduled UPS trailers a day for their Ogden plant; now it's down to about two and a half, and a full trailer that used to carry around 800 boxes now carries 1,000 to 1,100. “If we can send out one less pallet, that's a lot of money in the long scheme of things,” Bybee said of the wholesale side, where right-sizing has narrowed multi-pallet LTL shipments down by a full pallet or more.

Damage and returns have dropped, too. Filterbuy's companywide return-rate target, set by founder and CEO David Heacock, is 0.5%. Ogden now runs at 0.2 to 0.3%. “That's well under half a percent of all the orders we ship, which is remarkable,” Cory said. “With this being right-sized now, we have a lot less returns. That's definitely a great, great testament, because customers do not like having damaged air filters.”

The team has embraced the change, and it shows. The equipment was intimidating at first, Searcy said, but the Ogden team came around to it quickly, so much so that employees from other departments now volunteer to work the Packsize machines during peak season. “They keep breaking their own throughput records,” Cory said.

What's Next

Filterbuy continues to recycle all corrugated waste generated in Ogden. On the wholesale side, where B2B is growing 40 to 70%, Packsize's packaging design team now helps protect newer, more delicate lines like rigid filter cells - the next step before expanding on-demand automation to the rest of Filterbuy's network.

Filterbuy's engineering team has also been able to build on the integration in ways beyond the original packing use case. “Any idea that we've been able to dream up of how to integrate it into different parts of our business... we've basically been able to solve,” Searcy said.