Taming the UPS Monster
Anybody who ships fragile items via UPS, knows of the monster who lives in their automatic conveyor sorting system. We believe that the monster has a particular fondness for foam board products and waits for our large boxes to take a bite out of them. Anyone who has had damaged shipments from the monster knows UPS covers for him (or her) with an almost automatic email titled “insufficient packaging” anytime you make a complaint. I am sure that Fedex, DHL and others all have similar situations and damaged boxes are not infrequent.
What we have done is purchase overpack sleeves for may of our foam board box sizes. We do run into the “oversized limitations” on some of our bigger boxes of foam boards and for those we have changed all of those boxes to double-walled stronger test corrugated board. For the moment, the monster seems to be tame but I am sure he will make a return from time to time. As you can tell, our changes may have not been the least costly to make, but first of all we needed to reduce shipping damage significantly. I am not so sanguine to believe that we have tamed the monster forever, but we will always be on the lookout for better ways to package products. Any other ideas on this will be read with great interest.