Journal category
Fleet management, measurement, repair economics and warehouse practice.
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Send it through and a coordinator will answer — and it may well become the next article.
The subject
Pallets belong to nobody in most organisational charts. They are not stock, not equipment, and not consumables in the chart of accounts. They arrive under things, leave under things, and no single department owns the number — which is why the largest uncounted cost in a lot of buildings is sitting in plain sight.
The recurring theme here is measurement. A two-week manual count of what comes in, goes out and gets scrapped costs about eight hours of somebody's time and routinely finds a loss rate three times higher than anybody guessed. Everything else — repair policy, grade matching, plastic evaluations — is easier once that number exists.
The second theme is that price per pallet is the wrong metric. Cost per trip is the one that responds to management action, survives contact with a CFO, and occasionally reveals that raising the unit price by 23% cut annual spend by a third.
Recurring figures
Where to start
Start here. Everything else depends on this number.
The only pallet metric worth reporting upward.
Four numbers that settle the replace-or-repair question.
The most common serious warehouse hazard, and it is free to fix.
Your insurance conditions are probably stricter than the code.
Five operational mistakes, at our expense rather than yours.
6 articles
Anniversary posts usually list achievements. This one lists mistakes, because those are the only part of sixteen years that is actually useful to anybody else.
It requires nobody's permission, no software and no capital. It usually produces the largest single saving available to the operation, and it is almost never done.
This is the most common serious warehouse hazard I see, it costs nothing to fix, and almost nobody has been told about it.
Ninety seconds of my time is worth more than any other ninety seconds in this building, and it is not close.
A food distributor raised their price per pallet by 23% and cut their annual pallet spend by 34%. Both numbers are true, and only one of them is worth reporting.
A stack of empty pallets burns very differently from the same wood laid flat. Most operations know this vaguely. Fewer know what their own policy says about it.
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