Think Inside The Box
Using a mix of plywood, lumber, steel and more, Ontario’s Nefab plant has its customers’ needs all wrapped up.
by Scott Jamieson
My tour guides at Nefab Inc.’s Canadian plant tell me their business is not exactly rocket science. Still, this Ontario facility’s mix of thoughtful design and careful manufacturing provides North American industry with a range of intelligent packaging options that few outside the industry even know exist.
Nefab is a global packaging solutions provider with operations in over 30 countries and headquarters in beautiful Jönköping, Sweden, home of the renowned Elmia Wood forestry trade shows. Started over 60 years ago by one man making plywood and steel breadboxes, it grew through the ’60s and ’70s by creating secure and efficient packaging solutions for Sweden’s nascent telecommunications sector. Today Nefab specializes in packaging for the telecommunications and automotive sectors, but its full range of products and industries served is limited only by imagination.
The Nefab operation in Peterborough, ON, has served North American manufacturers, including those in Mexico, for over 20 years. Tour guides for CWP’s visit late last fall included process engineer Roger Donawa, business development manager Arnaldo Guédez, and project manager Carey Smith. While anyone with a saw and hammer can make a basic crate, this trio explains that Nefab’s role is to get to the root of a client’s shipping challenges.
“Our packages are chiefly plywood,” Arnaldo admits while sorting through some miniature samples on the boardroom table. “We compete against standard 9 mm crates made in a company’s warehouse, which is pretty simple. Yet we compete by coming up with solutions that fit a lot more product in the same space, that ensure it arrives in perfect shape, and that are easy to deal with after the product is unloaded. Our packages are shipped collapsed and can be collapsed after you’re done with them, so they occupy a lot less space in the plant or in the truck, whereas a wooden crate takes the same space empty or full.”
Nefab also competes using brainpower. This operation in southern Ontario alone employs several design engineers who use experience and proprietary software to optimize a company’s packaging and shipping operations. At one time few manufacturers gave much thought to what happened to their products once they rolled off the end of the assembly line. Just like glass milk jugs shipped in one-inch-thick wooden crates, the main thing was to get it there. Yet rising shipping costs, fuel surcharges and global customer bases have all changed that. Nefab is on the front lines of this battle to reduce waste in transport.
“We had one Canadian client using over 1,000 different types of crates to ship telecommunications parts,” Arnaldo says as an example. “Using our software, we helped them pare it down to under 15. It was a huge reduction in inventory and simplified their business. It also helped maximize the payload in trucks and, more importantly, airplanes.”
Box Is a Box?
Not really, says Carey. Despite a preference for standardization when possible, Nefab’s Peterborough operation makes a dizzying array of standard and custom packages for the many clients it serves in industries that vary from photographic film and heavy-duty drive motors to bank machines and car parts. Still, Carey allows that the bulk of their production can be placed in two broad categories represented by Nefab’s ExPak and RePak brands. Both are made from plywood, with steel joints, fasteners and closures and lumber or rolled steel bases.
• ExPak: This is a lightweight, collapsible and expendable crate design. While it can be re-used several times, it is suited for export or difficult applications where the shipper does not necessarily expect to see the package again.
• RePak: A wide range of collapsible containers designed, as the name implies, to be used over and over again. They can be folded to 1/5 of their actual size for efficient storage and back-hauling, an attribute that helped one Canadian auto maker to a four-month ROI on its RePaks by returning over 90 crates to its sub-supplier per truck rather than just over 20. Just how many uses a client can expect depends on the application and,
to some extent, the skill of its forklift drivers. “We’ve had some used over 600 times, and we offer repair services,” Carey explains, “but it’s typically the bases that go first, as they take the most abuse.” Thanks to this longer life span, custom features can be built in, such as front folding flap doors to allow safer and faster access, or detailed internal storage features.
Still, this is just the start Carey adds.
“In addition to these core products, we make heavyduty containers for large items, like drive motors for a local manufacturer, we make larger cubic systems for transporting items like bank machines and transit system ticket sellers, special crates for corrosion concerns, boxes for explosive cylinders, boxes to reduce theft, you name it. A lot of thought and design goes into the interior, which is really what sets us apart. We use various standard and custom designs to maximize load and minimize damage, whether it involves more wood, VCI bags, foam, honeycomb, corrugated, etc… Basically, for any shipping challenge, we come up with a mix of design and materials to solve it.”
Despite this variety, the Peterborough production plant is as streamlined as possible. To that end, the company has invested heavily in automation in recent years, and the flow of work and materials is computer tracked and optimized. Raw materials to be processed include:
• Steel: Rolls are bought from local Ontario mills, and are processed in house on custom machinery.
• Lumber: Upwards of 225,000 bdft are used per month, all bought locally. Some lumber may be bought cut-to-length for larger orders, but the majority is bought in standard lengths and cut to order on site. Lumber must be heat-treated to meet international phytosanitary regulations.
• Plywood: Wood-based panels comprise the bulk of the crate by weight and volume. Nefab uses SPF grades for heavy-duty applications, but its standard products are 6 and 8 mm made from white birch plywood. Even a 6 mm birch sheet can boast five plies, compared to just three in a similar SPF product. “That gives us more stiffness with the birch,” Roger explains as we tour rows of plywood carefully stored inside. The plant needs 90,000 m2 per month, and sadly almost all the high quality plywood comes from international sources. “We’d love to find a Canadian source for this,” Roger adds. “If any of your readers can help, we’d love to hear from them.”
Nefab’s global scale gives it the purchasing power it needs to acquire such products at the best possible price regardless of location. Still, Arnaldo says that given the large wood component in their products, they are subject to the same price swings in the building materials market as everyone else. He says that the use of OSB is a good example.
“We started out using a lot of OSB because it was cheaper,” he recalls. “Then a few years back, OSB prices went crazy, and we switched over almost entirely to plywood. Now, OSB prices are down, and we have clients looking at it again, so who knows. We have quotation software that lets us account for such swings in pricing.”
Custom Plant
Back in the plant, Nefab employees start the process by using proprietary automated machinery to turn
steel rolls into the range of joints, hinges and closures required. On a separate line lumber is processed on a Stromab TR500 optimized chop saw. Roger explains that with the price of lumber in recent years, efforts are constantly being made to reduce off cuts.
“The saw is optimized, of course, but we are in the process of tweaking our software to consider the whole day’s orders when looking at a piece of lumber. The optimizer will look at each piece of lumber’s ability to fill the orders while minimizing the number of off cuts produced through the day.”
To handle the high volume of thin plywood, Nefab uses two customized panel saws – an older Giben model and a new Holzma added in the summer of 2006. Roger notes that the trick is feeding the thin material efficiently.
“About 70% of our material is 6 mm, and 20% is 8 mm. These saws are configured for MDF or particleboard, but we need special vacuum loaders, as this material is too thin for dogging.”
After being cut to size, the plywood pieces are sent to a variety of stations to cut 45° bevels on the edges, to attach and bend joints, hinges and closures, build the base, and add internal features, and finally for wrapping and shipping in broken-down form.
Production is as close to assembly line style as possible given the amount of customized work, but the human component is still significant. As a result, both quality and safety are priorities.
“Quality is everyone’s job here,” Roger says as we walk past the ISO 9001 banner hanging on the plant wall. “We don’t have a dedicated quality inspector. We’ve seen plants with separate production and quality departments, and it ends in a lot of finger pointing. We have a final inspection at shipping, but for the rest we’d rather have everyone take charge of quality as they work, and sign off on that work.”
The plant’s safety record is good, he says, adding that they continue to upgrade equipment with safety in mind.
“Some of the older equipment can’t be brought up to modern safety standards to our satisfaction, with laser curtains for example. We recently bought a new press for the sole reason that we didn’t have any way to guard the older one to allow the job to be done safely.”
The plant is also working with specialists to reduce the noise level through the plant, which can get quite high in winter months when the air return system is engaged.
The plant works three shifts, five days a week with Saturdays available for overtime. In 2006, Nefab shipped over 250,000 crates from this location; a number that Arnaldo says would be much higher if life were simpler.
“If we get a lot of orders with internal packaging designs, it takes more time. We could produce at least 50% more if we were making empty crates, which from a pure production perspective might seem better. But our strength is making what the customer wants.”
Heading back to the boardroom, Carey agrees. “We specialize in the design of complete packaging solutions – It’s what sets us apart, and brings value to the customer. So, no, we don’t mind the extra work,” he concludes with a smile.
More details on Nefab can be found at www.nefab.us
