You can lower your industrial transportation costs by shipping products without putting them in their final packaging. This article discusses how this deferred packaging can reduce your transportation costs.

More Volumes Can Be Moved

Consider a winery as an example. Packaging wine into bottles at the plant increases the bulk that has to be shipped. This reduces the litres of wine that can be carried by any of the trucks that you own. Consequently, the cost of getting the wine to the retailer or final consumer will be high because of the higher cost of transporting fewer litres of wine in each truck. You can lower this cost by deferring the final packaging so that you transport the wine in large plastic bags. More wine can be transported on each truck in this way. This lowers the cost of transporting your wine. The wine can then be packaged at the destination that is close to the distributors or retailers.

Less Time Will Be Taken

You need specialised equipment, such as forklifts, to lift the delicate crates of wine into the trucks that will deliver the wine to distributors and retailers. The loading process can be time consuming. This can result in accessorial surcharges in case you are using a third party to transport your products. Deferred packaging allows larger volumes to be loaded onto trucks in a fraction of the time that it takes to load crates of bottled wine. The time saved can translate into cost savings if you can avoid paying warehouse workers for the extra hours that they take to load the prepackaged products.

Transloading Is Easier

Deferred packaging makes it possible for transloading to be done so that cargo can be delivered to the destination with fewer risks of damage during transit. When products are packaged at the processing facility, sorting has to be done as transloading is done so that shipments going to different distributors or retailers are dispatched separately. That need for sorting is eliminated if deferred packaging is implemented. This is because the entire shipment will be transported to the same packaging facility so there will be no need to put small consignments into different trucks once a shipping container arrives at an inland port. 

Deferred packaging may not be applicable for all products, such as electronics. It is therefore very important for you to discuss with industrial transport service providers so that you can find the best way to use deferred packaging if it is applicable in your industry. 

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