Tackling the Trifecta of International Shipping: Compliance, Corrosion Inhibition, and Efficiency

Tackling the Trifecta of International Shipping: Compliance, Corrosion Inhibition, and Efficiency

Shipping in general can cause a lot of headaches. If you need to ship overseas, there’s an extra set of boxes to check, especially if you’re using wood pallets or containers. To manufacturers who ship large or fragile equipment overseas, however, pallets are small potatoes.

Innate concerns in shipping large, heavy, and/or fragile equipment orbit around materials and convenience. You want to completely protect your cargo, but you don’t want to waste a ton of materials or space, and getting something large or heavy crated is no small feat. Taking this on yourself is an endeavor most avoid.

If you need to ship that perfect package overseas, you have a host of other concerns, especially if your contents are vulnerable to corrosion. Traveling via water can expose your product to humidity, salt, and other corrosive or damaging elements any time of the year. So now you need extra protection. Of course, if any part of your container is made of wood, the material must meet compliance to make it out of the country. This gives you a very challenging trifecta: maintaining cost-efficient packaging while protecting from the elements and maintaining compliance.

None of these factors can be ignored, so it’s vital that the packaging experts you work with are easily able to tackle all three. Interlaken Technology Corporation faced this exact issue when shipping its expensive systems. They manufacture large testing equipment for soil and asphalt testing, metal forming, leak and pressure testing, and autofrettage.  Interlaken found a vendor in Packnet who was able to meet all three demands in very important ways:

  1. The design engineers determined the best packaging yields and cubic utilization inside of crates as well as sea containers for each disassembled component. This allowed not only full protection of the components, but minimal material needed to do so and minimal space required to ship.
  2. Packnet is well-versed in ISPM and other standards, so compliant wood packaging was easily built into the packaging solution.
  3. The vapor corrosion inhibitors Packnet uses do not leave any residue behind, so when the customers received the shipment, they could use the pieces straight out of the box without any of the cleanup necessary with other corrosion prevention solutions.

When you work with the right vendor, shipping overseas is the easiest part of your process. Remember to ask your packaging company if it is ISPM 15 compliant, get details about how its corrosion inhibitors work, and inquire whether they do custom packaging for irregularly sized or weighted cargo.

If you think Packnet’s expertise might benefit your packaging challenge, request a free assessment here or contact us directly at 952.944.9124 or [email protected]. You can find more details about Interlaken’s case study here.

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