Advice to Package Faster (Without Adding More Wooks)

CannaBusiness
41

$50k minimum. Add a hopper feature, that’s probably another $30k minimum? Plus all of the R&D that comes with actually designing that? How much is shipping? Add on another two months of waiting by boat. Can the working dimensions be modified via a GUI or is it hard built, forcing you to keep the same box dimensions? I didn’t even factor in the sticker/stamp feature.

Let’s figure an employee’s work rate

250 boxes per hour (fatigued included, this was our average), 40 hours a week. That’s 10k boxes a week. Let’s assume they work 48 weeks out of the year. How much an hour? $15? It’s a pretty simple job but you may have to pay more depending on whether or not you’re a traditional market guy or not.

40 hrs/wk * 48wks/yr = 1920hrs * $15/hr = $28,800.

40 hrs/wk * 250 boxes/hr = 10k boxes/hr * 480 hrs/yr = 480k boxes/yr

480k boxes per employee = $28,800 expense/yr

Let’s assume the machine is $75k with a couple more features and shipping/tariffs.

$75k for machine divided by $28,800 expense/yr for employee = 2.60

2.60 employees paid for a year would cost the same as the packaging machine

2.60 employees * avg boxes made per year (480k) = 1,248,000 boxes.

You would need to produce 1.248m carts a year to justify the packaging machine. It’s totally dependent on your situation at the end of the day. That’s also assuming the machine is $75k delivered, which, like you said, it probably isn’t. If you can shell out the money for the machine (which can cost however much), go for it. But odds are, you can hire five peoples or so and get the job done just fine.

OP needs to tackle the touch points and role delegation. Remove as many touch points as possible and delegated roles accordingly and you’ll be golden

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42

Just hire wooks and pay them per unit. Weed out the sloppy ones and your price to pack is set. Screw all of that money in a machine, PEOPLE need money right now

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43

People also suck though lol. Especially wooks. They are cool for a few weeks then they start looking at you like they are entitled to hours. It’s hard to keep someone for a part time job they milk the clock and ask for fronts right before they disappear forever lol

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You don’t necessarily have to hire wooks. I’ve met plenty of people in the industry who have a professional background outside of cannabis and barely smoke and still do a wonderful job. There are people willing to start at the bottom to work their way up in a new industry.

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45

Depends on how deep your pockets are to how automated this can be. I bet @thompsonduke_hogan knows some slick ideas.

Don’t let that video fool you though on batch vs one piece. They still divided the work amongst 2 people, so that each person was technically in batch mode anyway. The first video is honestly too hard to follow to tell if he added a bunch of unnecessary steps to his batch method, and honestly his overall presentation seems contextual and biased.

It is faster for a person to repetitively do a single step, as mentioned previously, than to do every step for each item. Especially when the team is lone wolf mode. When it’s no solo go if one employee finishes early they can simply assist at whichever step is the furthest behind.

In fact, in that video they could’ve done the work even faster by dividing the steps further amongst more people in a more assembly line fashion, ensuring the overall downtime for each person would be smaller, especially during backups or other interferences in the line.

The make little walled sticker roll applicators that you just keep shoving boxes through, but since you’re going over edges your needs are a little more complicated.

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https://www.amazon.com/Emeril-Lagasse-Beyond-Automatic-Noodle/dp/B08PCLF49Q/ref=zg_bs_17548248011_sccl_3/138-8729814-0909011?pd_rd_i=B08PCLF49Q&psc=1

I’m curious if you could modify one of these to extrude badder/rosin

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Look into label dispensers and hand held label dispensers. Those two methods would at least improve the speed your employees can work at by stream-lining the label application step, but there’ll be a learning curve on getting them to stick and make the roll over edge real quick.

With the right sticker applicator you could have the stickers applied to the forward edge, and folded by a size restricted opening with a rudimentary tension arm behind it.

For streamlining the other parts you could get a custom box opening tool(think McDonald’s fries if you need an example), you could also get a custom box closing tool(think like a skater) then you just press the boxes against the tools once and done.

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48

Ya, I do pay them by the work they do. I do it by the unit, so that encourages them. I will sit down with them and show them how much I can do in an hour and follow off that 75% of what I can do. Good idea.

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So, I am using the batch-and-queue method to my employees. I find that way the most efficient. However I Am open to trying out new ways (one-piece flow) Im going to try that out next week and see how that works out on the efficiency & speed of packaging.

As for the bag idea, I might switch over to bags soon. Feel like what you said is true, it would take MUCH less time to package that out. Boxes do require more steps.

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50

Positivity FTW. Gotta promote that type of environment when your stuck in a room for hours on end packaging. But yeah I do agree with this. I try to promote a positive environment when I can.

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51

Yup! Pay Per Item is what I’ve stuck with for years now. I don’t find the hourly pay fair. Especially with a couple of my workers that CAN package boxes so much more than others. I agree that it’s more of a mental game than anything, maybe I’ll have to find a way to boost moral.

So far I just play videos on a screen. Youtube Videos. Documentaries etc.

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Im looking to maximize the output per hour on packaging. I haven’t had a chance to accurately measure out what my employees can do per hour. But realistically it’s sitting around 200-300 packaged disposables in 1 hour per employee. I have a team of 5 employees at the moment that do the packaging.

A semi-auto machine would be sufficient, boxed & labeled top and bottom with stickers. If you do have something in mind, feel free to DM me!

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I got to agrtee with that. I need to work on removing the touch points that aren’t necessary. Delegated roles could be a great idea too, because as of right now I just have everyone finishing out a specific task before moving onto the next. For example, packaging the box, then we go to putting the disposables in, then we go to sticker labeling.

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Label Dispensars & a custom box opening/closing tool could really work. I will look into that ASAP, if you have any reccomendations please let me know, a little more information I should add. The stickers aren’t on rolls. It’s on a piece of paper that we have to peel off of and then apply it onto the packaging itself.

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That’ll always require manual application, if you want to streamline this any further you’ll have to pay the extra cost to have those stickers on a roll.

Bags is a fantastic solution.

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I can have those stickers on a roll easily, I just have trouble finding the right direction in finding the right sticker applicator.

As you have stated, bags is the solution. And I agree with that, I might have to switch the packaging side of things to bags. Boxes are just a headache.

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The only catch is it doesn’t seem to have that same appeal. Especially where we’re at now with the market and packaging norms both in and out of the traditional market.

Seeing a lot of 10 in 10 in 1 packages lately. Of course you could still do bags and just shove them in a box similar to the way wraps are packaged in bulk. So still a 10 in 1, but then you save on the extra 100 box because the 10 boxes are the display.

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Nimble fingers, they always make the best production workers. From my experience. Need to get a team of hmong’s for ya, they’ll fold all the boxes needed for the rest of your life in a week, and they will feed themselves.

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Try out doing multiple steps at the same time. Have someone prefolding the boxes and someone else putting the disposable in. Switch things up every now and then, to keeps things fresh.

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60

Probably any of the packaging options are not things that you will actually want to purchase unless you are doing 10,000 units per hour or more.

You can 100% get a machine to grab your cart, put it in a box, put a sticker on that box, but that box inside a case, and put that case on a pallet, and then wrap that pallet with shrink wrap and send it down the line to the fork truck to take it to a truck.

Do you have enough production to make doing all of that necessary? Probably not. But I don’t know. :slight_smile:

Most seriously monotonous tasks can be fully automated - as long as they are almost exactly the same every single time. So if you are really interested in that - check out some packaging automation companies like:

Rockwell

Packaging Automation Corp

There’s SO MUCH out there for this - you probably have a local robotics packaging automation company. My brother in law does this work all over the country and my father currently does this for Amazon. Its not new science - but you really have to be at scale to make the square feet it takes up and the capital investment worth it. Otherwise - hire more humans do to things humans can do without automation.

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