Richmond, British Columbia-based Great Little Box Co is implementing an EFI™ Packaging Suite with Radius® as the core ERP technology to streamline its multifaceted operation. The Canadian business is not only a corrugated packaging producer but it is also one of the industry’s most diversified packaging converting companies. The software will allow Great Little Box Co to manage its corrugated box, label, flexible packaging, folding carton, protective packaging, shipping and moving and storage equipment operations.
All together in an industry first
The company’s software installation will be the one of the most robust and all-encompassing workflow systems available, with EFI Corrugated Business Estimating and Shipment Planning components integrated into the EFI Packaging Suite. As a result, Great Little Box Co will have unprecedented capabilities in centralized management of corrugated, folding carton, label, flexible and protective packaging in a single, end-to-end IT workflow.
The purchase decision stemmed from a need to better integrate operations added over the past 15 years, a period of time when Great Little Box Co. purchased nine different companies. Until now, the business has managed all of its services with an internally developed MIS workflow solution originally designed solely for corrugated packaging production.
“With GLBC’s highly diverse range of product offerings, our software systems require a great deal of custom programming, both to create new capabilities and to maintain the systems over time,” said James Palmer, the company’s Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Growth. “It’s a complex process and we are thrilled to have found a streamlined approach with an EFI Packaging Suite that is able to meet all of our needs in a timely and efficient manner.”
Better management
Great Little Box Co chose EFI’s Packaging Suite based on its versatility. “As GLBC continues to grow and diversify, finding a software solution that works for all of our broad range of services was an undertaking,” Palmer said.
Great Little Box Co primarily serves the food, food processing, pharmaceutical and nutraceutical markets, producing large volumes of offset- and flexo-printed products. When installed later this year, the new Packaging Suite system will bring more automation to managing the range of services the company offers, including complex multi-process jobs and kitting programs, such as offset-printed folding cartons that are die-cut, assembled and then inserted into litho-lam or flexo-printed corrugated boxes.
The company’s suite includes components designed to optimize production scheduling and automate many other tasks across Great Little Box Co’s four manufacturing facilities. New EFI shop-floor data-collection and inventory technologies are also part of the workflow, which will help with inventory management – a necessity considering the fact that 40% of the company’s quarter-million square feet of operations space is devoted to warehousing client work. In particular, the software will help move stock faster for clients eager to reduce the expense that comes with high-volume storage of large corrugated sheets.
