Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/808614
14 ista views • April 2017 • www.ista.org Specifications – Defining the Result Not the Path > CONTINUED FROM FRONT COVER missing, a knowledge gap that interferes with optimization. To really improve on our packaging we must depart from this comfortable but constraining model, and look instead at a different approach more familiar in other industries, that of a functional specification. We must robustly answer the question: what do we really want our packaging to do? This alternate approach facilitates collaboration, moving the relationship between supplier and user from "taking orders" to "working together to solve problems," with the goal of doing as good or better today than we did yesterday. A corrugated box is a manufactured product whose primary job is to contain and protect other products throughout their distribution process, to get them to market and to the purchaser or consumer safely and without damage. The distribution environment ends only when the box is unpacked and discarded. So for most food items the distribution environment ends at a grocery store, where the products are taken out of their cases, while for many electronics the distribution environment actually ends at the consumer when we take the computer or Blue Ray player or food processor out of its box, and hopefully recycle the box. While many boxes may also have additional roles in terms of marketing or presenting their contents for sale, even the most beautifully printed box has failed in use if the contents arrive to the consumer broken. Our functional spec likely includes both performance metrics and sustainability ("fiber savings") goals. Yet even from a sustainability perspective performance is key- regardless of whether it uses less fiber or not, a box is not sustainable if it fails to protect the product. The manufacture and transport of the contents that go into the box typically use an order of magnitude more energy and resources than the transport packaging itself, and all that goes to waste if the product is unusable. 1 But this is not all we mean when we say "we want our boxes to work." Working may also include boxes that set up seamlessly on our packaging lines, be they entirely human, fully automated, or somewhere in between. We likely want boxes to arrive in the right quantities and the right format for them to be easy to use. We may have requirements for how the box presents or sells our product, how easy it is for the packaging to be opened and display what we produce. And of course, we want to spend our money wisely. Some of these and others, together with carrying the product through the distribution system in a saleable fashion, combine to produce the true functional spec. The technical specification one builds from this assessment of needs must be driven by those needs, and correlate well with it. The collaborative work of building a robust functional spec can highlight opportunities for systems optimization, since how the box is used impacts the requirements. For example, the cost of a box that can survive extreme stresses from an aggressive clamping operation may outweigh the benefits of the container. It may be better to remove stresses from the environment than to try to design to accommodate the harshest conditions. In short, in any design process for a container, just like for the product itself, one must assure that the box is appropriately meeting the correct level of need. Understanding the underlying mechanics of why and how a package works moves us away from de facto standards, and allows us to continually evolve our technical specifications when we can better correlate them with our functional specification. While this truly applies to all packaging, we will focus in the rest of this paper on corrugated fiberboard boxes. Specifying by Cert Stamp The BMC, or box manufacturer's certificate, is the most used box specification by customers. The BMC is a guarantee by the box maker that the box meets certain standards set by the NMFTA, the National Motor Freight Traffic Association (http://www.nmfta.org/), so that the trucker in a less than truck load shipping environment will agree to accept liability for product damage in transit. The rules follow NMFTA Item 222. Effectively, the BMC stamp is a liability contract for damage during unit load shipping, and is not a guarantee that the box will be fit for use in the shipping environment, the warehousing environment, or anywhere else. Because the stamp serves as a relative measure of a performance floor, the stamp itself was never really intended to be used to as a specification. Nonetheless, the freight rules became a default spec that is still in use today, in part because they appear quite simple. Precise rules govern them, lending an air of science and accuracy as a specification. But the architecture is very coarse, so that an upgrade in one or more components of the combined board does not necessarily change the applicable BMC. As well, many box users mistakenly believe that all boxes with a given stamp, say 32ECT, will perform the same; in fact the stamp guarantees only a minimum performance level. For instance, if a box using average 42lb liners and 33lb medium is stamped with a 32ECT stamp, one may erroneously assume the box can be duplicated using any other "32ECT" combination and still perform. However, this box will be much stronger than if we made the same box using average 35lb liners and 23lb medium, even though both combinations qualify for the same 32ECT stamp, and both likely fail to qualify for the next "level" in the stamp hierarchy (40ECT). If you were putting the original box out for bid among suppliers, specifying only the stamp value would be likely to get you a bunch of less expensive boxes, but those boxes would not necessarily work as well in meeting