Eyes on Optimization
Siemens Healthineers is a leading MedTech company with over 125 years of experience. Their portfolio spans in-vitro and in-vivo diagnostics to image-guided therapy and innovative cancer care, and the equipment and services they provide are crucial for clinical decision-making and treatment pathways.
The company’s American Distribution Center (ADC) located in Plainfield, IN, is responsible for distributing to customers the reagents, assays, and parts used to support MedTech equipment. The distribution center needed a solution that would decrease packaging size and reduce the number of boxes needed to fill an order. They made the decision to go with MagicLogic’s powerful BlackBox solution as well as their Cube-IQ desktop graphical user interface (GUI).
Packing Smarter With MagicLogic
The data analyst at Siemens laid the groundwork for enhanced efficiency by refining their material master data, which included details such as product sizes, weights, and specifications. This provided the team with accurate baseline data to initiate improvements. Once integrations with MagicLogic’s Cube-IQ and BlackBox were completed, Siemens was able to see visuals for the pack out and improve training speed on the best way to pack their many products into boxes.
The process to increase the box fill rates presented a bit of a learning curve. Due to the nature of their products, a cautious approach was essential to ensure consistent success. Many of their products need to be packed in specific orientations, so orientation was a critical component when calculating fill levels, and BlackBox was able to easily accommodate that need.
The majority of their boxes started at about a 60% maximum fill rate that was raised in 5% increments over one to two week intervals. These increases continued as employees got better at finding the optimal configuration and stopped when determining a new packaging strategy was more time consuming than the savings justified.
Packing Precision Pays Off
Since implementing Cube-IQ, Siemens Healthineers’ Americas Distribution Center has achieved 90% to 95% fill rates. In addition, box counts have decreased by 5%, and they’ve seen a huge increase in boxes charged by actual weight rather than dimensional weight, equating to significant savings and reduction in carbon material usage.
“We have seen an overall payload fill increase of 14% for all broken case shipments,” said Sarah Sparks, packaging engineer at Siemens Healthineers. “And we’ve reduced single-use packaging by 27% since FY2022, with CubeIQ playing a key role in enabling some of the projects that contributed to this success. With all the improvements, we’re on track for significant YoY savings as well as enhanced sustainability for this specific project.”
The increased packing efficiency has benefitted Siemens Healthineers in multiple ways. It is a sustainability win that also saves the company money. Productivity at the distribution center has improved, and customers now receive fewer or smaller packages. Moving forward, Siemens has additional projects they plan to tackle in partnership with MagicLogic.
