In most organisations we deal with, the pallet is owned by procurement. Procurement's job is to buy a specified item at the best price, which they do competently. The problem is that nobody specified it — the spec was inherited, and procurement is optimising a decision that was never made.
Where the pallet actually belongs
A pallet is the bottom layer of a unit load. It interacts with case design, stacking pattern, wrap tension, trailer cube, racking geometry and the receiver's handling equipment. Every one of those is a packaging engineering question, and in a mature operation they are considered together. The pallet is the only element of the unit load routinely excluded from that conversation.
Four decisions that get made wrong because of it
- Footprint. Chosen by inheritance rather than by how the product tiers, so deck utilisation sits at 60% on some lines and overhangs on others.
- Deck coverage. Bought on board count and price, not on whether the product bridges. Dished bottom layers get blamed on wrap.
- Grade. Specified as A because A sounds safer, costing roughly a third more than the lane needs.
- Construction. Notched stringers bought into a warehouse that runs manual jacks, committing the crew to turning every platform by hand for the life of the contract.
What happens when you move it
We ran this experiment, informally, with a specialty foods distributor. Their packaging engineer spent half a day on the pallet question — something that had never happened in the company's history. Outcomes: one product line moved to a smaller footprint, recovering four positions a trailer. Economy decks were replaced on the bagged line, ending a crushed-case problem they had attributed to a carrier for two years. Two-thirds of their volume moved from A to B grade. Net effect on landed cost was a reduction of several percent, and procurement's unit price went up on one line.
That last detail is the whole story. The decision that improved the business made procurement's primary metric worse, which is exactly why the decision had never been made.
How to actually do it
- Put the pallet on the agenda of whoever owns case design. Once a year is enough.
- Measure deck utilisation per product family. It is a tape measure and a calculator.
- Let the lane set the grade, not the habit.
- Measure landed cost per unit shipped, not unit price per pallet. Different number, different decision.
- Ask your supplier to specify rather than quote. We would much rather be asked what to use than asked to price what you already decided.
The uncomfortable part for us
Doing this properly usually reduces what a customer spends with us. It also makes them a customer for a decade instead of two quarters, which has been a straightforwardly better business than selling people A-grade they did not need.
The four conversations that should include the platform
- Carton design. Case dimensions and the platform footprint determine deck utilisation and overhang. Deciding one without the other is how a line ends up at 67% utilisation forever.
- Stacking pattern and layer count. Which determines whether the load bridges, where the point loads sit, and whether the top layer needs a cap.
- Wrap specification. Film tension compresses a load downward into deck gaps. The wrap machine and the deck coverage are the same conversation and are never had together.
- Receiver requirements. Your customer's racking, conveyor tolerances and jack fleet are constraints on your platform choice, and they are discoverable by asking.
Why unit price is the wrong metric, concretely
Because improving the system frequently raises it. In the distributor example, the bagged line moved from an economy 5/3 deck to a 9/7 at a meaningfully higher unit price, which made procurement's primary number worse. It also ended a crushed-case problem that had been running for two years and had been attributed to a carrier.
Nobody had been doing anything wrong. Procurement had been measured on unit price and had optimised unit price, competently. The metric was the problem, and the metric existed because the decision sat in the wrong department.
The one-page brief that fixes it
For each product family, write down: carton dimensions, cartons per layer, layers per unit load, total weight, floor or racked, who receives it, and what their equipment is. Seven lines. Then hand that to whoever buys the platforms, or to us, and ask whether the current specification is right.
Most of the value in this article is in those seven lines being written down once. They almost never are, which means every platform decision in the organisation is being made by somebody reasoning from the last purchase order.
What this costs us, said plainly
Doing it properly usually reduces what a customer spends with us — fewer platforms, cheaper grades, longer service life. It also turns a two-quarter customer into a ten-year one. We have run this experiment enough times to be confident about which of those is the better business, and it is not close.
Priya, operations · Pallets Recycle, 1113 Ingram Ave, Richmond VA · published December 10, 2024 · 831 words. Corrections welcome — tell us if we have this wrong.