Case study | August 2026

An automotive parts supplier in Central Europe ships 40,000+ boxes per month to OEM plants and aftermarket distributors — with delivery windows measured in hours, not days. Their packaging waste was invisible until they started measuring it: rejected blanks, wasted tape, and damaged cases were running at 12.4% of materials consumed in the packing department.

The Customer’s Pain Points

The supplier packs 42,000–48,000 boxes per month across 30+ SKUs — brake components, filters, and electrical parts, in single-wall B-flute cases of 10 different sizes. Key problems:

• Blank rejection. The legacy erector rejected 3–4% of blanks due to mis-feeds and fold errors — each rejected blank went to scrap.
• Tape waste. The old tape head threw away a leader segment at every restart; with 15–20 stops per shift, tape waste ran at 4–6 m per shift.
• Damaged cases at the packer. Out-of-square or partially sealed cases caused the case packer to reject or crush boxes — ~1.5% of cases reworked or scrapped.
• No measurement. The plant had never measured material waste at the erecting station; the waste was buried in general consumables budgets.

The Solution: ZRAY Tape Sealing Case Erectors with Zero-Waste Tape Heads

ZRAY supplied two single-piece case erectors with tape sealing, configured for the supplier’s 10 box sizes. Three features drove the waste reduction:

1. Zero-Waste Tape Heads

• Cut-at-end-of-case: tape is cut exactly at the case edge, so no leader is wasted at stops and restarts — tape waste dropped from 4–6 m to ~0.2 m per shift.
• Vacuum wipe-down presses tape tails onto the case ends, eliminating the dog-ear tails that caused jams at the packer.

2. Precise, Verified Erection

• Servo-driven blank feed with vacuum detection: mis-feeds are caught before they enter the folder, and a mis-picked blank is rejected cleanly instead of being folded crooked.
• Case squareness verification: an in-line sensor checks each erected case against the recipe’s squareness window; an out-of-tolerance case is rejected before it reaches the packer.
• Recipe library for all 10 sizes with servo-positioned guides, so size changes no longer introduce alignment errors.

3. Material Tracking

• The PLC records blanks consumed, blanks rejected, cases erected, and cases rejected per shift, feeding the plant’s MES. Waste is now measured at the erecting station, not estimated in the office.

Results and ROI

The supplier measured 6 months before and 8 months after:

The 25% Story

Total packing department material waste fell from 12.4% to 9.3% — a 25% relative reduction. Broken down, the three components contributed:

• Blank rejection: 3.5% → 0.7% (−2.8 pp)
• Tape waste: ~1.2% → ~0.1% (−1.1 pp)
• Packer-side case damage: 1.5% → 0.4% (−1.1 pp)
• (Remainder of the 9.3% is general warehouse scrap, outside the erecting scope)

Annualized financial impact:

• Blanks saved (3,000+ per month × 12): EUR 26,000
• Tape saved: EUR 4,200
• Rework labor and scrap at packer: EUR 9,800
• Total: EUR 40,000/yr against a machine investment of EUR 89,000 (two machines) — payback in 26.7 months.

ROI Summary Table

What the Operations Manager Said

“The waste number was a surprise to everyone — it had been hiding in the consumables budget for years. Once it was visible, fixing it became straightforward.”

Lessons on Material Waste

1. Measure before you fix. Waste that isn’t measured is not a problem, it’s a budget line. Machine-side reporting makes it a number your team can act on.
2. Tape waste is pure margin. Zero-waste tape heads cost little to specify and eliminate a waste stream that never shows up in the P&L as its own line.
3. Feed accuracy drives everything downstream. Mis-fed blanks cascade into rejected blanks, crooked cases, and packer jams — fixing the feed fixes three waste streams at once.

If your packing department’s material waste is above 10%, the erecting station is likely a big contributor. Send us your waste data (or let our engineers help you set up measurement) — we will show you where the 25% reduction sits in your numbers. Request a material waste analysis or message us on WhatsApp at +86 13681839278.