AS BLACK Friday and Christmas approach, more orders need to move through the same buildings, often with limited opportunities to add people, space or equipment at short notice. The usual response is to look for more capacity. But before adding it, there is another question worth asking: **where is existing capacity being lost? Packaging is a good place to look.

A packing process that requires significant manual intervention may be manageable during normal volumes, but can become a constraint as orders increase. Right-sized packaging automation can help packaging capacity scale with changing order volumes. And what happens at the packing station does not stay there.

The size of the finished parcel affects what happens downstream. Unnecessary volume consumes space through sortation, staging and despatch before reaching the carrier network. Multiply that across peak-season volumes and packaging becomes more than a consumables discussion; it becomes part of warehouse and transport capacity planning.

Packsize, a provider of automated solutions for right-sized packaging, highlights an easily overlooked point: packaging performance may be measured at the packing station, but its consequences often appear on somebody else’s dashboard.

The warehouse manager sees throughput. Transport sees vehicle utilisation. Procurement sees material consumption. Sustainability teams see packaging waste. The customer sees the parcel that arrives at their door. Peak connects all of them.

There is another reason to examine packaging more closely this year. The UK’s extended producer responsibility scheme for packaging is entering its second operational year, with eco-modulation being introduced for 2026/27. Packaging design and recyclability are therefore becoming increasingly visible business considerations alongside operational performance.  The immediate opportunity ahead of peak, however, is simpler: identify packaging constraints before peak does it for you.

Packsize’s right-sized packaging solutions range from operator-assisted systems to highly automated packaging integrated into the wider fulfilment flow, allowing packaging to become part of overall operational capacity rather than an isolated process at the end of the line.  So the question isn’t simply “How many orders can we pack?” It is: “What is stopping us from packing more with the capacity we already have?” Sometimes, the answer may be the box.

For businesses seeking more efficient, less wasteful transit packaging, full information on Packsize’s extensive range of right-size transit packaging solutions can be found at www.packsize.co.uk