Corrugated board plants run some of the widest machines in the converting industry, with 3600mm to 4800mm corrugators handling liner and fluting at high speed. Deckle Plus brings the same mathematical optimization that paper mills use to corrugated sheet and box blank planning.
A corrugated board plant running a 4000mm corrugator at 200 t/day with 2.5% trim waste discards 5 tonnes of liner and fluting per day. At $600/tonne for Kraft liner, that is $3,000 per day in avoidable scrap, before factoring in the cost of medium paper and the energy consumed to process the wasted material.
A corrugated board manufacturer in Bhiwandi, Maharashtra produced single-wall and double-wall corrugated sheets and box blanks for packaging customers in the Mumbai–Pune industrial corridor. The plant operated a 4000mm primary corrugator and a 2400mm secondary machine, running both B-flute and C-flute depending on the week's customer orders.
The planning challenge was liner allocation. Kraft liner was sourced from two suppliers with different lot sizes, and medium paper was sourced from a third. When the production manager scheduled a week's corrugator runs, material allocation across three suppliers and two machines was done manually in a shared Excel sheet, with version conflicts between the planning office and the procurement team.
After deploying Deckle Plus, each corrugator was configured with its deckle width and flute-specific blade count limits. Liner and medium paper were set up as separate paper types with their own inventory. Production runs were assigned per machine and per flute specification. Material consumption per run was tracked automatically from intake inventory, giving the procurement team accurate replenishment signals without waiting for the planning team to update the Excel sheet.
Result
Material planning conflicts between production and procurement dropped to zero. Trim waste reduced from 2.8% to 0.7% within four weeks of deployment.
Deckle Plus supports any deckle width including 3600mm, 4000mm, 4800mm, and custom-built corrugators wider than 5000mm. Machine configuration accepts any value; the optimizer produces optimal box blank combinations for whatever deckle you have.
Each corrugator is configured with flute-specific constraints: minimum sheet width, maximum blade count for E-flute, cascade requirements for triple-wall structures. These constraints are enforced by the optimizer on every pattern generated for that machine.
Liner paper and fluting medium are configured as separate paper types with their own inventory. FIFO intake logs track which supplier lot is on each corrugator, and consumption per run is deducted from inventory automatically.
Customer box blank orders specify finished sheet widths. The optimizer finds combinations of blank widths that minimize trim across the corrugator's full deckle width, across all pending orders for a given flute type and liner grade.
Complex box blank orders requiring multiple width passes can be structured as cascade runs in Deckle Plus, with multiple production runs in sequence, each producing different blank widths for the same customer order. The system tracks fulfilment across all passes.
Specific questions about how Deckle Plus handles this use case.
In Deckle Plus, each production run is assigned to a specific machine and a specific paper type: in corrugated terms, a specific liner+flute combination. If your corrugator runs B-flute liner in the morning and C-flute liner in the afternoon, you create two separate production runs. Each run is optimized for the flute-specific blade count constraints you have configured for that machine. Both runs appear in the machine history for production tracking.
Yes. In Deckle Plus, liner paper and fluting medium are configured as separate paper types with their own inventory records. Supplier lot receipts are logged at intake separately for each material. Production runs consume liner and medium inventory independently based on the run's deckle width and quantity. Stock levels and FIFO allocation are tracked per material type, giving procurement accurate consumption data per shift.
Yes. The Deckle Plus optimizer handles any combination of widths that fit within the configured deckle width. For a 4000mm corrugator, a mix of 400mm, 800mm, 1200mm, and 2400mm blank orders would be evaluated across all valid combinations to find the pattern with minimum trim. The optimizer considers all permutations including multiple copies of narrower blanks; for example, 3×800mm + 1×1200mm = 3600mm, leaving a 400mm trim slot, versus 4×600mm + 1×1200mm + 1×400mm = 3600mm with a different waste profile.
Triple-wall corrugated board typically imposes stricter minimum blank widths and lower blade count limits due to board thickness. These constraints are configurable per machine in Deckle Plus: set the machine's minimum order width and maximum blade count to match your corrugator's triple-wall specification. The optimizer will enforce these constraints automatically for runs assigned to that machine.
Customer orders in Deckle Plus are entered into a rolling order queue. New orders can be added at any time, and the planner selects which orders to include in the next production run. The optimizer recalculates patterns in seconds whenever the order selection changes. This means a planner can respond to a customer changing their blank width specification on Monday morning by adjusting the order and re-optimizing before the corrugator starts, without disrupting the rest of the week's schedule.
Book a 20-minute call. We'll confirm Deckle Plus fits your specific workflow and show you a live optimization on your order data before you invest any further time.