When you consider the benefits of automation for your business, you likely think of efficient workflows, greater productivity, and other ways that automated solutions directly improve your company’s profits. However, there are many advantages to automation that affect more than just your bottom line.
Implementing automatic and semi-automatic solutions in your secondary packaging line can be a great boon to your employees. From improving employee safety to creating a more rewarding work environment, here are seven ways automation will strengthen your labor force, improve turnover rate, and help your team achieve more for your company.
Improve Employee Safety
Physical labor is a challenge that all warehouses and production facilities must face. Many key packaging operations—such as stretch wrapping and palletizing—require strenuous, repetitive motion. Manual stretch wrapping and manual palletizing processes are labor intensive, mundane, and present a health and safety risk due to the ergonomic challenges of bending, lifting, twisting, and other movements.
Switching to automated stretch wrapping and palletizing eliminates the risks associated with these manual processes. Employees no longer have to endure physically strenuous tasks, which lowers the risk of ergonomic injury in your warehouse.
Moreover, employees are less likely to experience accidents due to human error. For example, even a small mistake while manually palletizing a product load can lead to an unstable pallet that could tip over during transit. This puts both employees and products at risk. Automatic palletizing, on the other hand, creates a consistently stable pallet that can be moved safely throughout your facility.
Provide Better, More Consistent Product Quality
One of the greatest perks of automation in any industry is that it brings consistency to your processes. Automated secondary packaging solutions feature precise, programmable settings that give you complete control over pallet stacking and wrapping. This delivers a level of accuracy that even the best employees cannot replicate. Every single product load that moves through your facility will benefit from the most precise and reliable stacking and stretch wrapping processes available.
Reliable and consistent automation speeds increase your facility’s workflow while greatly reducing accidents and other safety risks. Moreover, better consistency minimizes the risk of product damage. Manual stacking or wrapping can create uneven containment force that either crushes products or allows pallets to tip over during transit. With automatic palletizing and stretch wrapping, product loads remain stable and safe as they move throughout your supply chain.
Make Room for More Meaningful Labor
When you implement automated secondary packaging solutions into your workflow, you hand off much of your company’s repetitive jobs to machinery. Many businesses and employees worry that this will lead to labor cuts. However, if handled correctly, automation brings new opportunities to your labor force.
With machines handling the tedious but physically strenuous tasks in your facility, employees are free to focus on more skilled, meaningful work. This allows you to optimize your workforce to accomplish greater levels of productivity. When both automatic and manual processes work in tandem, you can create a streamlined, efficient packaging line that makes the most of both technical innovation and employee skillsets.
Eliminate Mundane Work
At the end of the day, employees want fulfilling jobs that instill a sense of accomplishment. For many workers, repetitive tasks such as palletizing and wrapping don’t meet those desires. When automation handles these tedious jobs, your employees have the chance to take on more complicated and fulfilling work that offers a greater sense of achievement.
Team members who are free to focus on more skilled tasks can make better use of their talents while also finding new ways to grow and learn within your company. Automation gives your employees the chance to pursue more interesting work and accomplish more while still serving your business to the best of their ability.
Decrease Employee Frustration
Frequent workflow disruptions lead to frustrated and unsatisfied employees. When you rely on manual labor to accomplish repetitive tasks in your packaging line, you’re bound to run into interruptions. Employees can only do so much to keep up with fast-moving workflows and high product demands. When employees slow down or make a mistake, every step of the packaging line experiences the disruption.
Automated machinery speeds up processes and minimizes downtime in your packaging line. Reliable automatic and semi-automatic equipment keeps your operations moving smoothly and efficiently so employees can do their jobs to the best of their ability without worrying about errors, downtime, and other disruptions.
Invest in Employee Growth
One of the best ways to retain employees and create a consistent, motivated workforce is by offering plenty of opportunities for growth. When employees feel stuck in routine, physically demanding jobs, they won’t find many reasons to stay with your company. Furthermore, the strain of manual labor can force even the most dedicated employees out of your company due to workplace accidents or ergonomic injuries.
Automated solutions take over the routine tasks that leave employees feeling unsatisfied, which in turn allows your workforce to turn their attention toward roles that offer more growth opportunities. Additionally, the money you save with optimized automatic machinery can go toward providing additional training, career path resources, and other opportunities for your workforce.
When employees have room to grow, they can see a future for themselves with your company. Automation creates growth opportunities, which in turn improves your company’s turnover rate and helps you maintain a team of cohesive, well-trained, and passionate long-term staff.
Witness More Productivity, More Profits, and More Room for Growth
Many of the ways automation can strengthen your labor force revolve around how you reallocate resources after implementing your automatic solutions. Automatic and semi-automatic equipment help boost productivity and increase profits in your facility. By investing those profits back into your team and your overall facility, you can implement opportunities, resources, and solutions that help your business and your employees accomplish more than ever before. Optimizing your workflow with automatic equipment can lead to exciting endeavors such as expanding your team, investing in new equipment throughout your facility, and more.
How will automation transform your business? Discover the answers when you work with Robopac USA to implement the most effective automatic and semi-automatic secondary packaging solutions on the market. Explore our selection of semi-automatic stretch wrap machines and find new ways to enhance your workflow and invest in your employees.
