Packaging and Containers Manufacturing

Big Box Containers eliminate paper and cut administration work time by 38%

38%

Reduction in admin work

45%

Decrease in damage claims

About

Since its inception, Big Box Containers has provided both sales and rental options of new and second-hand marine containers, to the South African market. Big Box Containers also specialises in the modification of containers, to offer clients an original solution to meet their needs.

Industry

Packaging and Containers Manufacturing

Company size

51-200 employees

Founded

1997

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"Before Cargosnap, managing a claim involved sifting through scattered documents to find key information. The process was time-consuming and often unsuccessful."

Douglas Williams

Head of Development Refrigeration

The Challenge

Big Box Containers has spent over two decades building a reputation for quality in the container industry. With a fleet spanning new and refrigerated units, their operations depend on knowing the exact condition of every container — at inspection, at repair, at handover, and throughout its working life.

For most of that time, that knowledge lived on paper.

The need for change

Every container inspection followed the same path. A technician filled out a paper form on site. The form travelled to the office. Someone manually entered the data into the system. Sometimes the form got lost. Sometimes the entry had errors. By the time the information reached anyone who could act on it, the handling moment that created it was long gone.

This is the defining characteristic of an operation running without material handling visibility. The work happens. The data does not survive it.

The consequences were predictable. When a damage claim arrived, the team had to reconstruct what happened — sifting through paper stacks and computer files, searching for anything that proved the container's condition at a specific moment. Without high-quality visual evidence captured at the point of handling, proving what happened was nearly impossible.

Our approach

Making every handling moment visible

When Big Box moved to Cargosnap, the structural change was immediate. Every inspection, every repair, every handling event now produced a structured digital record at the moment it happened. Photos, videos, checklists, and condition data captured through the mobile app and uploaded automatically. No paper, no manual entry, no person in between.

Douglas Williams, Head of Development Refrigeration at the Cape Town office, describes what changed: the speed and accuracy of data capture, and the fact that the data was simply there when anyone needed it. The auto-upload to the cloud removed an entire step from the process and with it, the person who used to perform that step manually.

What started as a solution for one department quickly spread. The platform's flexibility meant every team could build workflows for their specific handling processes — container inspections, repair tracking, customer claims. Each workflow produced the same thing: a structured, timestamped, traceable record of what actually happened.

‘‘Everyone has a cell phone, and it is direct – the speed of the data capturing, and the accuracy of the data capturing is fantastic.’’

Douglas Williams

Head of Development Refrigeration

The impact

From proof to operational intelligence

The original problem was documentation. What Big Box discovered was something larger.

Every inspection captured in Cargosnap became a data point. Container location. Frequency of repair. Components that failed. Cost of maintenance over time. For a company managing an older refrigerated fleet, this kind of execution data is not just useful. It is the difference between reactive maintenance and informed decisions.

Big Box now extracts workflow data monthly, turning it into charts and trend analysis that inform purchasing, maintenance scheduling, and risk management. Douglas calls Cargosnap a data capturing facility. That is exactly what material handling visibility produces when it is built into daily operations, not just proof of what happened, but the data to understand why, and to act before it happens again.

The numbers

The numbers

Now to the facts. Big Box’s adoption of Cargosnap has reduced administrative work while giving them critical insights. In fact, 38% less time is spent on administrative work and a 45% decrease in paper costs. Douglas cites the App as the real game changer, ‘‘Everyone has a cell phone, and it is direct – the speed of the data capturing, and the accuracy of the data capturing is fantastic.’’ With such data, there has been a 45% decrease in damage claims.

These are the outcomes of making material handling visible. Not a software project. Not a process redesign. A structural change in how execution data is created, stored, and used — starting at the moment a technician picks up their phone on the workshop floor.