A portable forensic laboratory for investigating whether nuclear waste complies with international regulations. A mobile hospital for patients during a disease outbreak. A school annex. A wartime emergency room for acute care of the wounded. Even a forty-foot hot dog stand wrapped from end to end in an eye-catching red and yellow checkerboard pattern.
Each of these is an example of how that everyday, ubiquitous item—known the world-over as a shipping container—can be customized into something unique.
10- to 40-foot containers are today’s gold standard for moving a lot of things from place to place. But prior to the 1950s, most goods were relocated in simple wooden crates and loaded, largely by hand, in and out of trucks, trains and ships—a tedious and time-consuming practice.
Then in 1956, American entrepreneur Malcolm McLean started a revolution with the New Jersey launch of the first container ship. The converted World War II tanker was loaded with 58 one-size metal boxes that could be easily transferred by lift or crane between multiple modes of transport.
By the late 1960s other countries were adopting the template, relying on interlocking, stackable metal containers to move cars, furniture, clothing, electronics—or just a single family’s entire household goods in one big box. No one knows exactly how many ISO-standard shipping containers exist in the world today, but there are at least 65 million known to be in “active use” at any one time. Other containers are increasingly being adapted for non-shipping uses, which is where the Sea Box story begins.
A business that looks at the box from different angles
In 1983, Jim Brennan Jr. and a few colleagues named their fledgling container dealership Sea Box, Inc., coincidentally located in the same state where Malcolm McLean launched his industry-transforming ship back in ’56. Brennan, a designer with multiple patents, soon instigated a shift from standard, empty steel boxes to more interesting possibilities, inside as well as out. Just about anything a customer asked for could be fabricated; all the applications described above are examples of their recent work.
Bespoke customization soon became a primary reason people sought out Sea Box. The business was one of those fortunate to expand during the pandemic era, and now includes some 350 employees and footprints in Ireland, China, Australia and South America. U.S. military contracts remain a significant contributor to demand for standard as well as custom boxes: Sea Box launched a highly automated container-box manufacturing line in 2024 to accommodate the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DOD) need for containers to transport goods and supplies to troops stationed around the world.
Keeping your engineers happy and engaged
As the company has grown, the innovative spirit of the Sea Box enterprise has attracted engineers of the more adventurous kind. “Not everything in engineering is super flashy and exciting,” says John Salyers, now a project manager at Sea Box. “But when I was job hunting and found this company, I saw they were doing a lot of very creative projects with containers, both cool defense things and civilian applications like emergency housing for natural disasters, mobile office buildings—it ran the gamut of ways to use my skills.
“What really struck me—especially from a technical point of view—was that you could see your designs all the way through to fruition. They really push their engineers to be hands-on out on the production floor. You can be tasked with a project, start with a list of requirements, turn that into a drawing, and then work on that all the way until I literally would be standing outside watching the thing that I drew get loaded onto a truck after it was built. The satisfaction was huge.”
Sea Box mechanical engineer, Korey Greene, who has a construction-welding background, agrees. “You wear a lot of hats here and there’s so much diversity in everything we do; it’s really rewarding. Taking such a mundane-seeming thing like a shipping container and making that into whatever anyone wants is a thrill. If we can fit it in the box, we can do it.”
From a nuclear sample testing lab to a giant hot dog stand
It’s not as simple as it sounds, of course, as the nuclear-materials testing laboratory example shows. “There was an urgent need for that one,” says John. “There were a lot of specs because it was a government-related job. But they hadn’t fully defined what their need was so we had to figure it out as the project progressed. There was a lot of designing on-the-fly. In the end it was four airlocked containers connected together so all work could be done without going outside. You’d enter in one room, change and sanitize, then move on to the lab space. We had special air filtration systems to make sure everything was scrubbed and clean so samples didn’t get contaminated.”
At the other end of the customization spectrum was the 40-foot hot dog stand. Inside the box was a standard commercial kitchen but outside there was a “crazy paint requirement,” according to Korey. “I’m used to being able to say to our paint department, ‘here’s a container, paint it desert tan’ [often requested for military applications]. But when I showed them a rendering of the huge checkerboard pattern that covered the box they came back with ‘how big is each square?’. So I had to go back and make an engineering drawing just for the paint design. It was a wild ride.”
Pulling it all together with data-integration software
John and Korey are the types of talent Sea Box likes to attract to support the company’s open mindset, said senior program manager Mark Campbell. “I think we’ve barely scratched the surface in terms of some of the architectural boxes that we work on,” he said. “The aperture for expansion is wide open.”
Of course, a wide-open aperture absorbs a great deal of information. Another critical aspect of John and Korey’s jobs at Sea Box has been adopting and integrating digital software tools that track and harness all that product data and optimize the workflow of the complex enterprise they serve.
A painful PLM journey at the outset
“Our Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) journey has been an interesting one and, I suspect, as is the case with many companies, also a somewhat painful one,” says John. “When I joined the company in 2018, we were still using our basic parts database software, an EPN [engineering part number] system that was just a Microsoft Access database. The company was growing to a point where we were making so many new parts that the system was crashing every day.”
“It was a very paper-based, physical tradition that was probably fine once upon a time,” says Korey. “As the business evolved, our customers’ needs evolved, and our capabilities had to evolve along with that. In the early days we were going off napkin sketches and painting the boxes in the parking lot. Now we’re at a level of sophistication that requires accurate and reliable data tracking.”
Management realized it was time to shift to a full-fledged PLM system. But after a couple of frustrating years with one integration partner, the software development program was not going well and they parted company.
Time to bring in the experts
“We didn’t have the in-house expertise to do it ourselves,” says John. “When we found PLM-solutions provider Razorleaf they came to New Jersey to do a discovery session with us and we were very impressed. They had the expertise to quickly determine which of the issues were complex PLM problems—indeed difficult to solve—and which actually had some fairly simple solutions.” Sea Box began the process of switching off their old EPN system and moving to a PLM platform, Aras Innovator, which was recommended by Razorleaf.
Cleaning up dirty data
Given its multitudes of custom-container jobs, Sea Box had a large database, one plagued with what the engineers admit was ‘poor data entry etiquette.’ “You need to have good, clean data in your PLM system,” says Korey. “And when we want to send that data to Business Central [the ERP business management system the company is implementing and integrating with their PLM] that data also has to be clean. Razorleaf worked with us to identify which data needed cleaning up. This initially involved considerable manual-entry effort working with their team, and they also helped us with automating it, going forward.”
To keep the container workflow moving, the team set up standalone development servers with batch loading tools for trial runs. “This allowed us to test in a ‘sandbox’ without worrying about affecting our production department,” says Korey. “Giving us readouts of our data, providing a strategy for combing through that data, what’s good and what’s bad—Razorleaf was a massive help for us.”
While not every engineer needs to go as deep into the weeds as John and Korey, Sea Box has recently expanded from 25 PLM software licenses to 40. Training has been carried out in waves, with the Aras Innovator platform transition to be essentially complete by the end of 2025. “For our more recent hires, if you’re starting in this new environment with all-digital systems, it’s so much easier to get everything done more efficiently,” says Korey.
Okay, I can track my parts—but where are my CAD designs?
One significant issue still lurked underneath the huge progress in PLM capabilities at Sea Box. Their parts database was up and running, but they didn’t have their CAD-data files stored there, so they had no automated revisioning control over designs.
This CAD disconnect was creating a host of issues, says Korey. “Whether it was a 2D drawing or a 3D computer model, there was a lot of redundant effort. For example, you’d find a part number in PLM but you couldn’t find the CAD for the actual part so you would just redraw it again—this could happen 10, 20 or more times because it was faster to redraw the part than to try to sift through our system to find it. And disconnect between the systems could lead to potential human errors, like mis-entering part numbers or quantities.”
Again, they turned to Razorleaf, this time for CAD Connector software from ESSIG that tracks alterations to every design over time and is being linked to engineering-change management modules within their PLM system. “It’s all very well and good to have your revisions tracked in PLM, but to then have your drawings and models also associated with that revision tracking adds a quality to the data that we couldn’t previously achieve,” says Korey.
“Having CAD Connector benefits both production folks and project managers,” says John. “You can burn a lot of resources answering a simple question from operations about, say, where twenty ¼-20 screws go in a component. Our connector software democratizes CAD because there’s no longer a gateway between the engineers and the non-technical people; you can see your answers highlighted in the model right on your screen.” The company is working to get more ruggedized laptops out on the production floor, for use by manufacturing staff and quality-assurance people who need to inspect to drawings in real time.
Everything’s coming up CLOVER
Underpinning the entire digital operation is Razorleaf’s CLOVER integration platform, ensuring seamless data flow between Sea Box’s PLM, ERP, CAD and other programs.
“As we integrate our Business Central [ERP] system with our PLM, we’re running a lot of practice sessions to see how CLOVER is connecting things behind the scenes,” says John. “I think the greatest testament I can give to CLOVER is—even for me as an administrative user—that for the most part I don’t even know it’s there.” “What’s more, notes Korey, “we’re seeing massive gains in our engineering workflow.”
The view from 10,000 feet
Senior program manager Campbell has the 10,000-foot view on what building seamless connections between these advanced digital tools means to an expanding business. “We all want to work from a single source of truth,” he said. “You’ve got a repository where all your information is kept and configuration management that gives you revision control. What you’re looking for is repeatability, increased quality, consistency, and reliable product delivery.
“The bottom line is your ROI goes up exponentially when you start using these CAD tools. And when you cross-pollinate that with an ERP system, you’ve got a really powerful handshake. That’s the strength that I see Razorleaf has given us in terms of accessing these tools. There’s really no end to what you can do with these software platforms, and your time horizon expands significantly.”
Enthusiasm for the project remains high with Sea Box’s two “PLM journeymen,” as they call themselves. “This has been a large elephant to try to eat,” says Korey. “We’re taking bites at a time to do that, and we’re getting pretty close to the full meal. We are now starting to see the impact of the improvements we’ve made in our system that we could not even envision before. That allows us more time to be creative and puts more internal resources into our hands for the next DOD laboratory, food-delivery stand—or whatever our customers ask us for next.”
