High Volume, Thin Margin. Corrugation Punishes Waste More Than Any Other Vertical.
When margin per box is measured in paise, wastage is not a housekeeping issue — it is the business. A trim decision made badly, repeated across a month of production, is the difference between a profitable plant and a busy one.
What Makes Corrugation Different
Corrugation runs on volume. The plant is busy, the machines are loaded, and everyone is working — which makes it very easy to assume things are going well. But utilisation is not profit, and a corrugator running at full speed on a badly planned combination is losing money faster, not slower.
Paper is the largest cost and the least controlled. Grain direction, flute combination and deckle planning decide how much of every reel becomes a box and how much becomes trim. Those decisions are usually made by one experienced person, quickly, without any record of what was chosen or why.
The Leaks That Hit Corrugation Hardest
Each one has its own page, with the numbers worked through and a calculator you can run against your own figures.
Wastage and scrap →
Trim, set-up waste and rejected board counted at the month end as a single variance figure, by which point the cause is untraceable.
Paper and grain planning →
Deckle and grain decided by experience, on the spot, with no record. The plant cannot learn from a decision it never wrote down.
Production bottlenecks →
The corrugator runs, but conversion cannot keep up, so board sits and ages. Everyone is busy and the order is still late.
Manpower productivity →
Shift output tracked in totals, not against what the shift should have produced on that combination.
What Changes
- Trim and set-up waste attributed to the job and machine that caused it
- Deckle and grain decisions recorded, reviewed and improved
- Board ageing visible before it becomes a write-off
- Machine utilisation read against output, not just running hours
Not Your Setup?
See What This Looks Like On Your Floor
The 30-Day Automation Assessment is built around your actual plant, not a generic corrugation template.