Lean Manufacturing for Packaging
Cut waste, compress lead times, and improve quality—without sacrificing protection or brand. Influence Packaging applies Lean tools to packaging design, converting, fulfillment, and distribution so you ship more, with less.
What “Lean” Means in Packaging
Lean is the disciplined removal of activities that don’t add value for your customer. In packaging, that means fewer touches, fewer defects, smaller footprints, and faster flow from press to pack-out to dock.
The 8 Wastes (and Where They Hide)
- Defects: print color shifts, die-cut drift, mislabeled cartons.
- Overproduction: making more cartons/inserts than today’s demand.
- Waiting: approvals, plates, tooling, or materials stuck in queues.
- Non-utilized Talent: operators’ ideas not captured in standard work.
- Transportation: multiple moves between print, die-cut, glue, and pack.
- Inventory: excess WIP/finished goods tying up cash & space.
- Motion: long reaches, poor station setup at pack-out lines.
- Extra Processing: redundant inspections, re-taping, double labels.
Our Lean Toolkit
VSM Value Stream Mapping: visualize order-to-ship flow; expose bottlenecks, queues, and scrap loops.
5S Sort-Set-Shine-Standardize-Sustain: clean, visual workcells that reduce changeover time.
SMED Single-Minute Exchange of Dies: externalize steps, quick-release fixtures, color-coded makeready.
Kanban Pull Replenishment: right-sized batch triggers for cartons, inserts, labels.
Standard Work Visual SOPs with CT/QC checkpoints; error-proofing (poka-yoke) on labels and barcodes.
QA at Source Go/No-Go gauges, first-article checks, SPC on critical dims & print Delta-E.
Typical Wins in 60–90 Days
- 25–50% setup time reduction on repeat SKUs.
- 10–30% freight/DIM savings via right-sizing & pack-count optimization.
- 20–40% fewer defects/returns with built-in quality checks.
- 15–35% WIP reduction through pull systems & smaller batches.
Quick ROI Estimator
Enter estimates to see annualized savings (client-side only; no data collected).