5 Signs Your Packing Area Is the Bottleneck
5 Signs Your Packing Area Is the Bottleneck
Your pickers are flying. Your warehouse layout is dialled in. Your freight is booked. So why are orders still going out late?
In most warehouses we walk through, the answer is sitting at the packing bench. It's the one part of the operation that rarely gets measured — and it quietly caps the output of everything upstream of it.
Here are the five signs we see most often. If two or more sound familiar, your packing area is the bottleneck.
1. Orders queue at dispatch — even when picking is on time
The classic symptom. Pick rates look healthy, but there's a growing pile of picked orders waiting at the benches every afternoon. The line isn't slow because people aren't working hard — it's slow because every carton takes more touches than it should. Reaching for the tape gun, finding the edge, taping, flipping, taping again. Multiply those seconds by hundreds of cartons a day and the queue builds itself.
Quick check: stand at dispatch at 2pm. If there's a backlog of picked-but-not-packed orders, you've found your constraint.
2. Overtime spikes at peak — but only at the benches
When volume lifts, most areas of the warehouse scale. Packing often doesn't — you can't easily add benches, and new casual staff take days to get up to speed on taping and void fill. So the same packers stay back late instead. If your overtime bill lives almost entirely in the packing team, the process is the problem, not the people.
3. Your packers double-tape every box
Watch a carton get sealed with plastic tape. Odds are it gets two or three strips across the top — sometimes an H-pattern — because nobody trusts one strip of plastic to hold. That's double the tape, double the passes, double the time, on every single carton.
Water-activated tape (WAT) seals with one strip. The adhesive bonds into the carton fibre, so a single pass does the job plastic needs three for. That's the single biggest reason it's faster.
One of our customers measured it after switching: 13.5 cartons per hour on plastic tape, 43.5 on WAT. Same packers, same benches, same cartons. Three times the throughput — from changing what happens in the last ten seconds of the pack.
4. Tape gun complaints, sore wrists, RSI reports
Handheld tape guns are hard on people. The repetitive snap-and-pull motion, hundreds of times a day, shows up as wrist and shoulder strain — and eventually as incident reports and workcover claims. It also shows up as inconsistency: tired hands seal worse cartons by 4pm than they did at 9am.
An electronic WAT dispenser removes the motion entirely. The packer taps a button (or the machine auto-measures), a strip presents itself, they lay it on. Less strain, less variation, and new starters are productive on day one — no tape gun technique to learn.
5. Reships and "arrived open" complaints
Every carton that fails in transit costs you three times: the replacement stock, the freight to resend it, and the customer's confidence. Plastic tape fails predictably — it pops in cold, lets go on dusty or recycled cartons, and peels at the corners under load.
If your customer service team has a template response for "my order arrived open," your seal is costing you money you're not tracking.
The common thread
None of these are people problems. They're process problems concentrated in the last metre of your warehouse — and they compound. Fewer roll changeovers (WAT rolls run up to 305 metres, versus roughly 66 on a plastic roll), one strip instead of three, no tape gun, no rework. That's how a bench goes from 13.5 to 43.5 cartons an hour without anyone working harder.
It's also why Amazon seals virtually every box it ships with water-activated paper tape. At their volume, seconds per carton are the whole game.
Find out in 60 seconds
Not sure if WAT is right for your operation? We'd rather tell you straight than sell you tape. Answer a few quick questions and we'll give you an honest read — including if it's not the right fit.
Take the 60-second WAT assessment
Or call us on 1300 66 11 61 and we'll come walk your packing line.