Frequently Asked Questions About Optimizing Parcel Fulfillment

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October 13th, 2023PACKAGINGCARTONIZATION

We compiled some of the most frequently asked questions (FAQs) from prospects and ultimately customers. When faced with sustainability initiatives or budget cuts, optimizing packing and packaging often gets overlooked.

Take a look at these FAQs to understand how easy it is to implement Paccurate’s cartonization engine for ~16% less transportation spend, ~13% less corrugate usage, and ~22% less air shipped.

Question: What happens if I don’t have stock keeping unit (SKU) dimensions?

Answer: No problem! We partner with the best dimensional solution in the industry, Cubiscan. Working with Cubiscan, you’ll easily retrieve dimensions for all of your inventory. Then, we can talk about how we put those dimensions to good use once captured.

Question: My dimensions aren't great (but they exist) - will I still get a benefit from Paccurate?

Answer: Nobody in fulfillment has 'perfect' dimensions. We are very familiar with this reality and most of our customers have a similar challenge to varying degrees. We baseline our projected benefit against whatever is happening in your WMS today, good, bad or ugly, so you'll know exactly what can be done with your existing dimensions.

Question: We have a lot of tribal knowledge that goes into packing. How can I utilize Paccurate and incorporate that information into the platform?

Answer: One of the 'soft' benefits of Paccurate's platform is that you can identify, record, and implement anything that is currently 'tribal knowledge'. Two cups need to get packed, and it's tribal knowledge to flip one upside down to nestle into the other? There's a rule for that.

Question: Our WMS Cartonization works fine today. How could you improve upon that?

Answer: Let's find out! We offer a free evaluation as part of our pre-sales effort and as part of that evaluation, we can show you the 'theoretical perfect' you could achieve. We will work to quantify an ROI (if any) and present you with findings and improvements to decide what to do from there.

Question: We already have advanced cartonization with rules setup. Will you be able to make further improvements?

Answer: Paccurate's 'secret sauce' is the ability for us to take cartonization one step further past “densest 3D packing” and intelligently incorporate your negotiated rate card into the cartonization decision. This typically yields an additional 6-8% savings on annual transportation spend.

Question: It's great that you can recommend the optimal pack, but my packers won't follow those instructions anyway. How can I support them to change their process?

Answer: We've found that oftentimes, the packers make poor packing decisions because of a lack of clarity around HOW to pack orders. We provide the option to integrate an image of a package with a representation of the items, and can even incorporate a certain item order to the packing instructions as well. Packers love this feature as it makes their lives easier.

Question: A cloud-based cartonization solution is too slow for us. Are you sure you can handle our volume?

Answer: Our average response time is 2ms (at scale!) with a max throughput of 10,000/second. We have many enterprise customers who have reported we are faster than even on-prem solutions.

Question: This integration will be too complex. How can you help me, without slowing down our team?

Answer: The average integration development work takes around 2-3 weeks, depending on the extent of the pack rules. This is a much simpler and quicker integration than say, order-picking automation.

Question: What differentiates you from a standard liquid fill and max dim check approach?

Answer: We have a cloud-native 3D bin packing algorithm that takes advantage of modern parallel processing capabilties in the cloud, meaning we can work through a much larger range of possible packing solutions and orientations than a standard liquid fill approach.

Question: Your company doesn't have robust enough cybersecurity policies. How can you promise data security?

Answer: We are working through our SOC II Certification as we speak, and expect to have that completed by mid 2024. Note that since we partner with large enterprises too, we have already worked on formulating complex and robust policies to conform to enterprise cybersecurity standards.

These are some of the many questions we get from prospects during their research. We love talking about optimizing parcel fulfillment, so if you have more questions you don’t find listed here, please reach out to us and we’d be happy to discuss the perfect solution for your packing challenges.

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