Every operations consultant will tell you to reduce SKU complexity, and they are usually right. One footprint means one buying spec, one racking configuration, one loading pattern, one training conversation. The savings are real and they show up immediately.
The costs show up slowly, in two places, and they are rarely attributed to the decision that caused them.
Cost one: shipping air
If your product line spans a bakery item in shallow cases and a beverage in tall ones, forcing both onto a 48 × 40 means one of them is wasting deck area. Deck utilisation below about 85% is money you are paying to move empty space, and it compounds on every load, for years.
We worked with a specialty foods distributor whose lightest line used 61% of the deck. Moving that line alone to a 48 × 36 recovered four positions per trailer and cut their outbound freight on that product by nine percent. The second footprint cost them one extra line on a purchase order.
Cost two: overhang
The other failure mode. Cartons that hang past the deck edge lose a startling amount of compression strength — the corner of a case is where almost all of its vertical strength lives, and an unsupported corner transfers that load into the case wall. A one-inch overhang is commonly cited as costing around a fifth of stacking strength. Two inches is worse than twice as bad.
What makes this expensive is that the damage appears at the customer, as crushed bottom cases, and gets logged as a carrier claim or a packaging problem. Almost nobody traces it back to the pallet footprint.
A more honest rule than 'standardise'
- Standardise within a product family, not across the company.
- Two or three footprints is usually the optimum for a mixed-line operation, not one and not nine.
- Any line using under 85% of the deck deserves its own calculation.
- Any line overhanging at all deserves an immediate one.
- Count footprints by purchasing complexity, not by SKU count. Two footprints in the same grade from the same supplier is barely more work than one.
Where standardisation genuinely wins outright
Automated systems. If you run an AS/RS, a conveyor line or robotic palletising, footprint variation is not a cost, it is a failure mode. There, one footprint — and a tight tolerance on it — is correct, and the right answer is to change the product packaging rather than the platform.
Everywhere else, the question is not "how few footprints can we run" but "which footprint fits this product". Those sound similar and lead to very different annual freight bills.
How to find your own worst line in twenty minutes
You need a tape measure and your product dimensions. For each product family, multiply carton length by carton width by the number of cartons in one layer, and divide by the deck area of the platform you ship it on. That is your deck utilisation.
A 48 × 40 platform has 1,920 square inches of deck. Twelve cartons of 16 × 10 inches is 1,920 — perfect. Ten of them is 1,600, which is 83% and marginal. Eight is 1,280, which is 67% and costing you a third of every position you pay to move.
Do this for every family and rank them. The worst two are where the money is. In our experience most mixed-line operations have at least one product sitting under 70% and nobody has ever calculated it, because the platform was chosen before that product existed.
The overhang arithmetic, which is worse
Corrugated cases carry almost all of their vertical strength in the four corners. Support a corner and the case performs to its rated stacking strength; cantilever it over the deck edge and the load transfers into the sidewall, which is not designed for it. The commonly cited penalty is around 20% of compression strength for one inch of overhang and considerably worse for two.
What makes this expensive rather than merely inefficient is where the damage appears: at your customer, as crushed bottom cases, logged as a carrier claim or a packaging fault. The platform footprint is almost never the suspect, because the pallet arrived intact.
The rule we actually give customers
- Standardise within a product family, not across a company.
- Two or three footprints is the usual optimum for a mixed-line operation. Not one, and not nine.
- Any family below 85% deck utilisation earns its own calculation.
- Any overhang at all earns an immediate one, regardless of utilisation.
- Count complexity by purchasing effort, not SKU count. Two footprints, same grade, same supplier, same delivery is barely more work than one.
- Automated lines are the exception: there, footprint variance is a failure mode, and the right fix is changing the carton rather than the platform.
The counter-argument, fairly stated
Every additional footprint adds a reorder point, a storage location, a potential stockout and a chance that somebody grabs the wrong one on a busy Friday. Those costs are real and they are mostly operational rather than financial, which means they land on people rather than on a budget line. A second footprint introduced without a labelled, separated storage location will cause more trouble than the freight it saves. Do the storage design first.
Priya, operations · Pallets Recycle, 1113 Ingram Ave, Richmond VA · published May 21, 2024 · 875 words. Corrections welcome — tell us if we have this wrong.