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'Book-smart' system doubles productivity

Book seller cuts labor requirements, shipping costs, and lost-in-mail rates with new shipper packaging system.

As the top and bottom web materials feed into the system, a packaging operator places a book on the bottom rigid board web.
As the top and bottom web materials feed into the system, a packaging operator places a book on the bottom rigid board web.

Alibris, Inc., a leading marketer of new, used, and hard-to-find books, receives and ships thousands of book orders each day at its 100ꯠ-sq’ warehouse in Sparks, NV. The company sells books through its own Web site, as well as through partners such as Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Borders book stores. Shipper packaging efficiencies are critical to maintaining optimum throughput capacity at the warehouse.

The three-touch method

Alibris prides itself on what the company calls its “three-touch” method—open, receive, and ship—the touches referring to the number of times a book is handled from the moment it enters the warehouse until it is sent to the customer.

When books arrive at the warehouse from a bookseller, an Alibris employee opens the packages. The books are then given to another employee or “receiver” who checks the individual book’s condition, keys in an order number to retrieve a printed-out packing slip, puts the packing slip inside the book, and places the book into the appropriate tote, depending on its sales channel or carrier assignment. When the bar-coded tote is filled, it is placed on a pneumatic conveyor belt and automatically routed to the correct packaging lane. Each book then is packaged, labeled, and shipped at a single station.

Smart sensing system

Director of operations Brian Duarte and vice president of operations Mark Nason are constantly evaluating ways to further improve productivity and cut operating costs. After reviewing various packaging options that stayed true to the three-touch method, they discovered the PriorityPak automated system from Sealed Air Corp.

Using smart sensing technology, the PriorityPak system scans an item’s dimensions and then delivers the correct amount of Cold Seal cohesive-coated PriorityWrap rigid liner board from two supply rolls to the PriorityPak machine. The liner board is designed to provide stiffness and rigidity, and the cohesive coating only sticks to like-coated surfaces. As the two sheets of rigid board are fed into the packing machine, a patented XRS roller system creates a seal that suspends, centers, and locks the product (in this case, a book) between the board sheets, minimizing product shifting and providing additional corner protection. No staples are required, and the book stays securely snug within the packages, ready to endure the rigors of shipping and handling.

Mark Nason notes, “We were excited to learn there is an automated packaging system available that met our criteria of easy integration into our existing processes and offered reliability, ease of use, and reasonable cost.” The system also ensured consistent high-quality seals, which was not the case with some other equipment Nason and Duarte had observed in action.

Installation and start-up

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