Packaging machines for Chennai

What a container does to a pack

A container is hot, humid, and in constant motion for weeks. Three things follow, and all three are avoidable:

• Cartons soften. Board absorbs moisture and loses stack strength, so a stack that was safe on your floor is not safe at sea.
• Straps go slack. Tension set against a stiff carton is lost when that carton softens — which is why strapped stacks arrive loose and it is not a machine fault.
• Condensation forms. Warm goods loaded into a cool container, or the reverse, produce water inside the pack that nobody put there.

Film and strap together

For a sea journey the two do different jobs and neither replaces the other.

Strap holds a stack square while it is rigid. Film holds it together as it softens and settles, and keeps moisture off the outside faces.

Where a load must hold for weeks, using both is not belt and braces — it is the specification. Where a buyer bans strapping across a printed face, film with corner board carries the load instead.

Set the film force against your own cartons rather than at a default. Too much crushes a softened carton; too little lets the stack walk.

Auto and electronics, inland

Not everything leaves by sea. Component supply into the assembly plants around Oragadam and Sriperumbudur is a line-side problem, and it is judged on how the pack opens rather than on how it survives.

Bins that can be reached into, stack heights that need no step, wraps that come off in one movement — none of it appears on a datasheet and all of it appears in a customer complaint.

Where kitting is involved, the packing has to preserve the set. A kit that arrives complete but unidentifiable costs the receiving plant the same as a short one.

Marks that survive a port

Shipping marks are read by people who will never contact you to ask a question. Whatever is unclear will be guessed at.

Mark on two faces, in the position the buyer specified, with symbols rather than sentences. Number cartons within the consignment so a short-landed box can be named.

Labels applied over film come off with the film. Apply the label to the carton, then wrap over it, wherever the mark has to survive.

Where a pack must not be laid flat, mark it and design for it being laid flat anyway.

Keep a photograph of the marked carton with the shipping documents. When a buyer queries a mark months later, a photograph settles it and a description does not.

Leather, and a trade the city keeps quiet about

Chennai and the Ranipet corridor behind it hold a large finished-leather and footwear trade, and leather packs unlike anything else on this page.

It carries a smell that transfers to whatever shares a pallet with it, and film holds that smell in rather than keeping it out. Where leather goods travel with anything else, separate the pallets rather than the cartons.

It also arrives at the packing bench with moisture still in it, and moisture weakens board from the inside. A carton that felt firm when it was packed can be soft by the time it is stacked in a container.

Humidity on your own floor

The climate acts on your material before it ever reaches a container.

Board stored in an open shed near the coast is already softer than the specification you bought. Tape adhesive picks up moisture and grabs poorly. Strap left in the sun goes brittle and fails at the weld, which looks like a machine fault and is not.

Store board, tape, film and strap covered and off the floor. It is a shelf and a sheet of plastic, and it removes more complaints than any setting change.

Where cartons are made to order, check the board grade on delivery rather than assuming it. The difference shows up at sea, not at your gate.