Corrugated Packaging & Carton Plants
A box plant's own cycle — specification, cutting plan and roll stock — over the standard ledger.
A corrugated box plant is a manufacturer whose product is defined before it is made — every carton is a geometry and a stack of paper grades — and whose margin is decided at the cutting knife, in the trim thrown away from each roll. A general ERP can hold the customers, the invoices and the ledger, but it has no idea that a 520mm sheet cut from a 2000mm roll wastes 440mm, and no way to plan three orders onto one roll to stop it. Nama runs the same accounts, stock and sales every other customer runs, and adds the one thing a box plant is actually built around: a cutting optimiser that decides which roll feeds which layer of which order.
The modules this sector leans on
Shared with every other Nama customer — configured for how you work.
- Carton Manufacturing — the cut planned, not guessed Cutting-plan optimisation for corrugated boxes — least trim from every paper roll.
- Inventory Management — Quantity, Value and Where It Actually Is Multi-warehouse stock, batches, serials, stocktakes and the cost behind every movement.
- Sales — Quotation to Collection, With the Price Explained Quotations, orders, delivery and invoicing under pricing, discount and credit rules.
- Production Management — What It Cost, Not What It Should Have Bills of material, routings, work orders and the real cost of what you produced.
- AR & AP Customer and supplier balances, ageing, settlements and the money moving both ways.
- Ledger Chart of accounts, journals, cost centres and the financial statements built on them.
Why a general ERP mishandles a box plant
Most ERPs model a product as a code with a price and a bill of material. That is enough for a factory that assembles fixed parts, and useless for one whose cost turns on how a flat sheet is laid out across a paper roll. The box a customer orders next week does not exist yet, its cheapest production depends on what other orders are in the queue, and the single largest number on the job — the trim wasted at the knife — is one a general system never computes at all. A corrugated plant that runs on generic software ends up planning the cut in a spreadsheet beside the ERP, which is exactly the decision that decides the margin.
The product is a specification, not a catalogue
A box is not picked off a shelf; it is described and then made to order. Nama holds that description as a carton specification — finished dimensions, the flat sheet before folding, the paper grade in each layer, the fluting, the print, the production stages — and lets specifications nest, so an assembled display unit knows the plain boxes it is built from. The carton module is where those specifications, the customer orders that reference them, and the cutting plans that fulfil them all live.
The roll is where the money is
Paper is the majority of a corrugated box’s cost, so a box plant’s real inventory question is not “how many boxes” but “how many linear metres of each grade, at each width, in which lot”. Inventory in Nama holds roll stock exactly that way — item, grade, width, length, lot — because the optimiser plans against those attributes, and because lot tracking is what gives you traceability when a paper batch turns out weak. When a plan is approved, material issues withdraw the specific rolls it named, so what leaves the store is what the plan intended, not the nearest roll to hand.
Sales, cost and the ledger underneath
Because a carton order is a sales document, the ordinary machinery works on it: pricing, credit and delivery, tax and e-invoicing, and the receivables that chase what the order is worth. Production draws its bill of material straight from the cut plan rather than a hand-kept recipe, and trim booked as a co-product means the cost of a run is the paper it consumed. All of it posts to the same general ledger every other Nama customer keeps — the box plant is not a separate island of software, it is the standard system with the one cycle a box plant needs bolted into the middle of it.
Every screen, field and setting is documented in full.
Read the documentation →Good question — already answered
Does Nama actually optimise the cut, or just record it?
It optimises it. The material planning document runs a constraint solver — Google OR-Tools' CP-SAT engine — over your orders and your roll stock, and returns the cutting plan that wastes the least paper, including which pending orders to batch together as companions. It is not a spreadsheet you fill in; it is the plan you execute.
We make single, double and triple wall. Can one specification describe a multi-layer board?
Yes. A carton specification names the paper grade for every layer — facing, fluting and liner — and the optimiser plans each layer independently, finding the best roll for that layer's own width and grade. Multi-wall board is the normal case, not an exception.
How does the trim waste reach our costs?
You define trim as a co-product on the planning configuration. When production is executed the trim is captured as inventory or scrap rather than vanishing, so the manufactured cost of a run reflects the paper it actually consumed, not an estimate.
Is this a standalone cutting tool, or a full ERP?
A full ERP. A carton order is an ordinary sales document with pricing, credit limits, delivery and e-invoicing; production, inventory and the general ledger are the same ones every Nama customer runs. The carton module adds the specifications and the optimiser on top — it does not replace the system underneath it.
Companies already running Nama ERP
A note of thanks and appreciation to the team at Namasoft for their effort, and every appreciation for the company's products. Thank you.
Get started with Nama today
Tell us how your business runs and we will show you how Nama ERP fits it — in your language, on your infrastructure.