That said, while loose loading is effective in transportation, it is very time consuming both when loading and unloading. This will naturally impact the labour costs in terminals and keep trucks tied up for hours between each transportation. It is clear that for shorter distances the costs of manual handling and loading will start to outweigh the benefits of higher cubic fill.
The interesting question is where the break-even point is and when does it makes sense to look at alternative methods, e.g. a large container that provides very good cubic fill but makes the manual handling and loading much faster. For this purpose we have developed the BigBox.
When simulating only the labour costs vs. truck fill we can see that even distances up to 500 km are more economical to transport using the new K.Hartwall BigBox compared to loose loading.
Loose loading also means that sortation is done twice as both terminals are sorting the same shipment. When using a pre-sorted BigBox container at the first terminal, the second terminal can act more as a cross-docking location and additional handling is avoided.
The BigBox is also a very effective solution compared to other load carriers when handling large and odd-sized parcels, due to better cubic fill and effective manual handling.
Introducing the BigBox:
It is a foldable and stackable container that maximizes the cubic fill with double stacking but also reduces the time required for loading and unloading by more than 50%.
Main benefits:
- Extremely time-efficient loading and unloading reducing truck waiting time from 2,5h to 0,5 h
- Simple and user-friendly manual handling
- High cubic fill thanks to double-stacking
- Very efficient return logistics
- Reduction of product damages
- Compatible with automated tipping
