FASTBOX · Improvement and sustainability of box production’s process for e-commerce

Panotec’s a dynamic company in north-east of Italy founded in 1986 when it created and patented an innovative and flexiblesystem for producing corrugated cardboard boxes at the customer site. Each system was designed to be able to provideboxes and packaging materials for products that widely vary in size, material and configuration. Panotec has a worldwidedistribution base. Customers that use Panotec equipment are able to reduce packaging costs and inefficiencies bybypassing the normal supply chain for corrugated boxes. The project that Panotec’s going to develop is about a system forproducing boxes for e-commerce sector. Nowadays more and more people buy products with e-commerce and theseproducts must be prepared for shipping in as short as possible time to satisfy consumers and boxes should protect theproduct inside. The objective that Panotec wants to reach is to improve the actual process of boxes production, also from thepoint of view of environmental sustainability. The system which will be developed will ensure the automatic optimization ofbox dimension, minimize volume of packaging, reduce use of raw material due to the automatic optimization of dimension,reduce use of non-recyclable material, reduce time for preparing box for shipping, increase safety of products. From thepoint of view of environmental sustainability, the system allows to obtain boxes without fillers, that could only become nonrecyclablegarbage, and so the end-consumer will have only boxes 100% recyclable. The system will give also benefits forlogistic with elimination of inventoried boxes of different types, and for management and costs of warehouse. It will also bepossible to produce a box when it needs and for every kind of different products, adapting dimensions on it. This projectwould like to reach sectors like online retailers, returns management, third party logistic. Studies about the project say thatthere should be expect up to 70% saving in costs of raw material.