We do this free for customers because it almost always finds something, and what it finds is usually embarrassing in a way that is also cheap to fix. You can run it yourself. Here is the whole method.
Before you start
Pick an ordinary day. Not month-end, not a peak week. You want normal behaviour, which also means not announcing to the floor that a pallet audit is happening — people straighten up, and you will measure the straightened version.
Hour one: count what you have
Walk every location where platforms live, including the ones nobody counts: behind the building, beside the compactor, on the trailer that has not moved since spring. Record count, footprint and rough condition for each pile.
Then compare the total against what your production schedule actually consumes in a week. Most sites hold two to three weeks of platform inventory and believe they hold one. That gap is floor space and cash.
Hour two: watch the dock
Stand at tine height and watch twenty fork entries. Count how many strike the pallet rather than entering it cleanly. Note whether damage lands on the top or bottom lead board. Lay a straight edge on the dock plate. This single hour explains the majority of the damage in most buildings.
Hour three: time the dig
Pick three pickers and time how long each one takes to obtain a usable platform, from leaving their position to returning with one. Do it six times. If the average is over ninety seconds, your pallet area is costing you a measurable fraction of a headcount.
While you are there, note whether grades and footprints are mixed. They almost certainly are, and that is the cause of the ninety seconds.
Hour four: follow one pallet out
Take a single broken platform and trace what would happen to it. Who moves it? Where does it go? Who pays? In roughly half the sites we visit, the honest answer is "it joins the pile behind the building, and eventually we pay a dumpster company by weight to take away material that has resale value".
The findings you will almost certainly have
- You are holding more platform inventory than you need, in more places than you knew.
- Your dock plate or leveller is damaging lead boards and has been for years.
- Grades are mixed at the point of use, costing picker minutes every shift.
- There is a pile outside that is a fire-load and pest finding waiting to be written up.
- Your disposal is a cost line where it could be a credit line.
What to do with it
Fix the dock plate. Separate grades at receipt. Set an inventory target and a reorder point. Get the outside pile valued — a meaningful share of any old pile is still repairable, and that portion has money in it. None of these need a project; all of them need somebody to have spent an afternoon with a clipboard.
The form, if you want one
Four columns is enough: location, count, footprint, condition. One row per pile. Add a fifth column for "who knew this was here", which sounds flippant and is the most informative data you will collect.
For the dock observation, tally marks in three columns: clean entry, strike on top board, strike on bottom board. Twenty entries is a sufficient sample to tell you whether you have a geometry problem, and it takes about fifteen minutes at a working dock.
The five things people discover that they did not expect
- A trailer nobody has emptied. Almost every multi-door site has one. It frequently contains serviceable platforms and occasionally contains something considerably more interesting.
- Platform inventory held in three to five separate places, none of which know about each other, with a combined total nobody has ever added up.
- A dock door with a damage rate several times the others. This is the single most actionable finding available and it takes twenty minutes of watching to establish.
- Grade separation that exists on paper and not on the floor. Someone set up an A-grade area in 2022 and the labels are still there.
- A disposal arrangement nobody has reviewed since it was signed, frequently charging a tipping rate for material with resale value.
What not to do with the findings
Do not turn it into a project. The reason this audit works is that every finding has a fix measurable in hours: grind the plate lip, label two staging areas, set a reorder point, phone a recycler. Convert it into a workstream with a steering group and nothing will happen, because the individual items are each too small to survive a prioritisation meeting and collectively too large to ignore.
Pick the two cheapest and do them this week. Then do the audit again in three months, which takes an hour the second time because you know where everything is.
Why we do this for free
Partly goodwill and mostly self-interest. A customer whose dock plate is destroying platforms buys more pallets from us and trusts us less. A customer whose operation runs cleanly buys fewer and stays for a decade. Over seventeen years the second has been a considerably better business, and it is also a great deal more pleasant.
Marcus, yard supervisor · Pallets Recycle, 1113 Ingram Ave, Richmond VA · published June 11, 2024 · 874 words. Corrections welcome — tell us if we have this wrong.