How to Decide on packaging type – Counting or Weighing?

Complex question isn’t it?

Irrespective to Any Industry selling large quantities of products, Accuracy, quality assurance and customer satisfaction are of utmost importance while packing consumer products.

Fast and accurate sorting, quantity per pack and packing methods are essential for manufacturing efficiency and quality control.

Products are apportioned precisely and packaged correctly to avoid costly replacement and reputation-damages.

Incase of High Volume manufacturing, A common practice of packaging operations is to pack by weight.

Unfortunately, companies utilizing this conventional packaging method may be reducing down their profit margins and brand reputations, when packs with inaccurate quantities resulting from product not being exactly the same weight. Example: full pack of mushroom to weigh 200gms, whereas some pack might have 10, some 12, etc. due to individual weight variation.

This critical decision like using weight or piece count, dependents on which will be most accurate method for the specific product at hand. Whatever is the decision, will drastically impact customer satisfaction and bottom-line revenue.

While certain production packaging lines utilize individual weights to pack on per pieces usually done by online Weigher. Some common problems that can arise using this technique is Over or undercount of items in Pack, usually formed due to weight variations of individual items which when added together totals up to weight of complete pack. While the effect is minimum in small quantities, such individual weight variations become major when multiplied by thousands of packs. The result accumulates to a sizable number causing problematic profitability issue.

Undercount packages gives the sense of being cheated to customers and causes dissatisfaction, negatively affecting company’s reputation and decreasing sales by diminishing brand loyalty. On the other side, overcounting simply gives product away for nothing. Hence impacting profitability. As companies are not able to eliminate overcount pack issues, hence Freebies as ‘Buy 2 get 1’ or ‘Buy 20 by 1’ etc are introduced.

For products with even slightly weight variations, packaging apportionment on a per-piece basis is often the most efficient, cost-effective method, as it is simply far more precise than conventional weighing systems.  Best way to start is with a detailed analysis of packaging type, pricing method, weight variation, packaging methods, etc helping us to select appropriate direction to proceed.

Author: Abhijeet (Founder & CEO), with more than 18 Years of Industry experience ranging from Industrial Automation, Weighing, Product Inspection and Disruptive Market Solution development is a True Problem Solver and Design thinker. He is First generation Entrepreneur and has been associated with Fortune listed companies in his past assignments. Please write in to us to connect with him.