Pack Studio, a new packaging design platform, drives packaging cost analysis upstream into logistics planning

Before a new vehicle reaches production, an automaker has to decide how every part will be held, protected and shipped. That's often true for hundreds or thousands of components, and frequently before suppliers are even confirmed. Those decisions set how much a truck can carry and how much returnable packaging a programme has to buy – and they're expensive to revisit once tooling and containers are ordered.

Pack Studio, a packaging design platform that launched last year, is built around that decision point. The company grew out of MIT and developed algorithms to prepare parts for additive manufacturing – packing objects into a 3D print bed as tightly as the geometry allows – and has adapted that computational nesting toward the problem of fitting parts into boxes, onto pallets and into trailers.

Scott Huddas, the company's co-founder and head of business development, said packaging has long been treated as a downstream task rather than a planning input. Packaging optimisation, he said, had "been a slow, fragmented process buried deep in the supply chain."

Huddas' observation sits alongside a shift Automotive Logistics has tracked across the industry, in which OEMs have moved packaging closer to logistics. General Motors has consolidated its packaging engineers under the logistics function, and Nissan has built packaging requirements into early product design to reduce the number of truckloads it runs. Cummins' returnable packaging lead, Robin Newing, told Automotive Logistics that packaging "lives across the entire supply chain" and belongs on the agenda of every supply chain executive.

Huddas said the tool's earliest traction came from packaging engineers at OEMs. "It spread like wildfire in the first six months," he said. "But outside of that, the supply chain planning and logistics planning for new vehicle launches is where this has a huge impact."

His reasoning followed the same logic behind the industry drawing the two functions – logistics and packaging engineering – together. "You have to start with the part to know how much volume it takes so that you can plan for the logistics," he said. "They're really hand in hand – that's why you're seeing these teams get brought together."

Where the cost sits

In a live demonstration to Automotive Logistics, the platform took a part's CAD data and modelled orientation, dunnage – the internal material that secures and separates parts – packaging options, palletisation and truck loadout, ranking each solution by cost per part. It could equally be set to disregard cost and return the layout that fitted the most parts on a truck. Huddas described the output as a "total landed cost, instant total landed cost per packaging and logistics," combining packaging and freight into a single figure per part. 

Much of that cost was capital. A returnable solution commits a programme to a fleet of containers bought upfront, so the analysis that sized a tote also sized the investment behind it. Huddas pointed to outputs estimating how many totes a programme needed, the resulting capital expenditure, the logistics cost and the implied return on investment – figures used by planning and finance teams. Cube utilisation, or how fully a trailer's volume is used, was calculated automatically, letting planners size loads for fill before committing to them. 

"The logistics side is the untapped piece of this," Huddas said. "But you have to start with the part to know how much volume it takes so that you can plan for the logistics."

Reducing concept work at launch 

The volume of a launch is where speed matters. Huddas described the tool as "automating what packaging engineers have to create for every single part" across the thousands of components a new vehicle requires – work historically built by hand and compiled in presentation software for sign-off. One rack supplier, he said, had estimated that unpaid concepting took up around 40% of its engineering time, a share he expected Pack Studio to cut to "5 or 10%." 

Early adopters have begun to test the approach. Lucid Motors ran an entire vehicle launch on the platform, Huddas said, replacing a workflow that relied on separate density and palletisation tools alongside manual reporting. The company reported reducing estimate times from 15-20 minutes to two to five minutes, compared with its previous toolchain rather than with a manual-only process.

A one-year review of that deployment, published by the company in June, put the change at a 70-85% reduction in time per estimate, 250 to 600 engineering hours saved per launch and $17,000 to $42,000 in labour savings per launch. Huddas has characterised the labour figure as the conservative, easiest-to-measure portion of the total, with the larger gains sitting in the packaging and freight optimisation applied across the thousands of estimates a launch generates.

Rivian had also switched across, Huddas said, and Ford was introducing the software in stages, while it had been added to the packaging engineering curriculum at Michigan State University.

A year of rapid development

The platform itself has moved quickly through 2026. Cost estimates for corrugated packaging now draw on live raw material pricing, covering linerboard, corrugating medium, foams and coatings, so outputs track market conditions rather than static industry averages. A single optimisation run evaluates expendable corrugated, returnable plastic bins, large-format metal racks, pallet configurations and full truckloads simultaneously, returning a one-page report formatted for engineering, sourcing and logistics teams.

Quoting has emerged as a second lane alongside launch planning. Tier one suppliers are using the software to include packaging and logistics costs in RFQ responses, while buyers use it to validate supplier-proposed packaging before committing to tooling. The company is also introducing a multi-part kitting capability that packs complete kits of dissimilar components into a single shipment, extending the nesting mathematics from individual parts to full assemblies. 

That breadth was anticipated in the company’s commercial plans. "We designed the go-to-market for exactly this ramp," said Jeff Enslow, brand and marketing vice-president for Inkbit and Pack Studio. "The industry showed up on schedule. Now we scale." 

Moving packaging planning upstream 

Several market pressures have sharpened the case for planning packaging earlier. New EV manufacturers have been launching vehicles on compressed timelines with small teams. The EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation has strengthened the argument for returnable systems that carry upfront cost and need planning – a driver Newing has also cited. And the data the platform already captures, such as part weights, material volumes and truck space, feeds sustainability reporting; Huddas said instant carbon and water-usage estimates were in development but not yet finished. 

Automotive Logistics will explore Lucid Motors and Rivian’s experience of using Pack Studio during a vehicle launch in a forthcoming feature.