Evaluation of carton packing rules for high volume operations

Warehouse operations often include a step where large numbers of boxed products must be rapidly packed into shipping cartons, but little attention has been paid to the benefits that can be obtained by using a good packing rule. The work reported here is directed at determining the connection between packing rule and packing performance. First, the components of a packing rule are determined. Then, the components are combined into sixteen different packing rules and are analyzed to determine the resultant packing performances. The analysis is made using a computer program that simulates carton packing. Actual data from a company's operations are used as well as a set of synthetic data with known best‐case packing characteristics.

The best packing rule is to pack the largest boxes first and align the longest‐middle‐shortest box dimensions with the longest‐middle‐shortest carton dimensions. This packing rule reduces the carton's average empty space by about one third when compared to disorganized procedures, and reduces the worst‐case results by about half. Despite these significant improvements, even the best rules could not reduce the average amount of empty space below about 20%.