Are you experiencing stockouts during peak season? A shortage of the right boxes, void fill, or protective packaging can be disastrous for your business. You might miss shipments, pay expedited freight costs, and deal with unhappy customers. Packaging production planning can be easily overlooked, but missing it is usually the first thing to cause a bottleneck when demand spikes.

In this blog, we’re walking you through how to build a production capacity plan that holds up under pressure. That way, you can ensure peak season becomes a growth opportunity rather than a scramble.

Why Packaging Capacity Planning Gets Overlooked

Most operations teams are diligent about planning raw materials, labor, and machine capacity well ahead of peak periods. Packaging can become an afterthought. In some cases, it’s treated as a commodity that will be there when needed.

That assumption tends to break down at predictable trigger points. Examples include new product launches, a promotional push that increases demand, or a seasonal spike that stresses the entire supply chain at once. Any of these can expose poor packaging production planning.

The Cost of Under-Planning for Peak Season

Without good packaging production planning, you’ll experience these costs that can add up fast:

  • Emergency or rush orders at premium pricing. This exact situation happened to Great Lakes Coffee Roasters. The company’s previous packaging vendor wasn’t delivering on time, which forced leadership to purchase larger stock boxes at almost double the cost. Since switching to Jamestown Container, the company no longer has issues with packaging delays. Learn more here.
  • Production line stoppages. Your lines wait on materials instead of running product.
  • Overtime and labor costs. Teams scramble to catch up once materials finally arrive.
  • Damaged customer relationships. Delayed shipments cause the most harm to customer relationships, and can be costly for your business.

So, how do you adequately plan for peak production seasons? Follow these steps:

Analyze Historical Data

The best way to plan for capacity is to look at your history. Pull prior peak-season usage data. Do you see any patterns? You may keep the following questions in mind:

  • How far in advance did packaging usage start climbing?
  • Was the ramp gradual or did it spike sharply in a short window?

But you have to do more than just analyze last year’s numbers. You must also layer in your expected growth, new SKUs, new customers, or expanded promotions. That way, your plan reflects where the business is heading.

Map Your Packaging Lead Times

Oftentimes, different packaging materials have different lead times. A stock box, custom die-cut carton, and printed retail packaging don’t move through production on the same timeline. Once you know your usage patterns, build a timeline working backward from your peak demand date to identify exactly when orders need to be replaced.

Communicate Early With Your Packaging Partners

Your packaging suppliers can’t reserve capacity or materials for demands they don’t know about. Sharing your forecasts early gives your vendor the lead time to plan production runs. The earlier that conversation happens, the more flexibility you’ll have.

Use Technology to Your Advantage

Manual forecasting makes it hard to catch a demand spike before it results in a shortage. That’s where a tool like Jamestown Container’s electronic vendor managed inventory (eVMI) program comes in. Our eVMI tool gives you real-time visibility into your packaging inventory and usage trends. That means replenishment is driven by actual consumption rather than guesswork. As a result, you have fewer emergency orders, tighter alignment between production and packaging supply, and a partner who can see demand shifts coming. Learn more about eVMI here.

Work With Jamestown Container for Your Packaging Needs

If you have questions about maximizing your packaging production planning, reach out to the experts at Jamestown Container. For over 70 years, we’ve been helping businesses get the right packaging solutions for their needs. We’d love to help you, too.

We offer everything your business needs for its packaging, and have professional affiliations that allow us to serve customers around the globe. Additionally, we maintain industry certifications — including an ISO 9001 accreditation — to hold us to the highest standards in manufacturing excellence.

Whether you need boxes, POP displays, or other packaging necessities, we’ve got you covered. We also offer other services to help you get the most out of your investment. Our contract packaging services handle everything from assembling displays and packaging products to coordinating freight. We also offer an eVMI program that automatically replenishes your packaging so you don’t have to worry about inventory.

Additionally, we adhere to rigid sustainability practices to minimize the environmental impact of our packaging solutions. We use recycled linerboard from the Greenpac Mill, which is one of the country’s lowest producers of paper mill landfill waste.

Let’s Get Started

Want to learn more about what we can do for you? Reach out to us today.