Car accidents happen every day – in fact according to an article published on Newsweek.com in August 2015, the U.S.
was on track for 46 million accidents last year. With 210 million drivers on the road about 6 percent, or about 125,000 people, were expected to get into an accident daily.
Ninety-four percent of car accidents in the U.S. involve human error, according to Google. To combat distracted driving, the tech world is developing technologies to reduce these accidents by assisting drivers and helping them make better choices.
Blind spot monitors, lane deviation alerts, backup cameras and automatic brakes are becoming standard in many car models. And eventually driver-less cars may become the norm. Google, Tesla and BMW are already testing a fleet of self-driving cars, which are intelligent enough to take you where you want to go safely by removing the potential for human error.
When it comes to stretch wrapping,about 0.5 percent of loads shipped will not make it to their destination safely. It doesn’t sound like much, but every year that 0.5 percent adds up to $60 billion worth of products that are unsellable due to damage.
How do you know your loads won’t be part of that 0.5 percent?
Just like cars are taking the human error out of driving, a new generation of intelligent stretch wrappers is taking the human error out of stretch wrapping.
Conventional stretch wrappers require the operator to make choices to set up the machine to wrap a load effectively: things like rotation speed, number of film layers, wrap force applied to the load, etc. Unfortunately, the interactions between these choices aren’t always obvious and it’s hard and tedious work to arrive at the right combination.
Consequently, it’s all too easy to wind up with less than satisfactory results – loads that have an unnecessary risk of being damaged during shipment as a result of ineffective stretch wrapping.
But with intelligent stretch wrappers, the machine will choose the correct settings based on things the operator knows, like the load’s weight, shape and make up. Then the stretch wrapper will wrap a load so it ships with the least risk of being damaged on the way to its destination. This intelligent wrap set up is based on 40+ years of stretch wrapping expertise.
While we’re not yet ready to hand over control of our cars, we can feel comfortable trusting stretch wrapping to computers. The risk of human error, and billions of dollars in product damage, can be reduced.
This post was published on March 25, 2016 and updated on September 13, 2017.
March 25, 2016
