The best part of being in the business world is learning about ways to save money.  This can be from time spent on less important things that should be delegated to simply changing tape for your warehouse.  There are so many different ways to be efficient and to start changing the way our company works.  I truly enjoy being apart of victories and understand that our failures and lost money are a reminder about being wise and thinking about all the different areas of being successful.  Lately, with the bonus of eCommerce starting to become one of the biggest sales industries we have been working hard to be successful at shipping our items with the best price and most safe for our clients.  This area is something that we want to really narrow down our costs and possible competitive advantages against our competition. So I just wanted to go over some of the areas that have helped us cut costs and improve our quality.

The first eCommerce section that we ended up changing and lowering costs and increasing capabilities was such a small thing.  It turns out that tape is a big deal when it comes to shipping and getting the best quality and lowest costs are easier said than done.  To be honest I really only thought that packing tape existed in one flavor.  But there are different thicknesses and types that hold all kinds of different weights.  There is also gum tape and it is water activated and is much stronger and can be super fast as well once you program a machine to cut it to the perfect length.  I have really been impressed with the whole process and am excited to rock the future without new water-based tape. 

See we were using up to 15 strips of tape for each of our cardboard boxes that we were shipping.  This was because some of our products are really heavy and some of our employees get a little excited and go overboard on taping. But it turns out that in some cases it was needed with the type of tape we were using.  So we ended up calling up a packaging supplies store and asking what might work best for our company.  It turns out that for the cardboard boxes that we were using we could incorporate gum tape.  This was a small investment to begin with but we ended up saving 69% of all our costs of tape within 3 months.  That was a massive difference and it allowed us to cut labor costs because our workers were able to do their job 30% faster.  That is a huge deal in eCommerce.

The process of using a gum tape dispenser is simply having a machine that wets and cuts the tape to a certain length.  Our machine programs the legnth and width of each box that we use.  So we can choose to have it cut 3 pieces of tape and have it done within a few seconds.  It then is put on the package and it perfectly fits each time giving the perfect amount of tape.  Once we programmed the right lengths our team was flying through packages and we were super happy that they enjoyed not having to lean over and tape as much.