Pallets are part of the foundation of any warehouse operation. It is important to to choose the right type and quality of pallet for your facility for these reasons:
1. You avoid pallet damage, weakness, and failure.
2. It lowers risk of rack damage or warehouse racking collapse.
3. It reduces costs while increasing unit load efficiency.
Avoiding Pallet Damage and Failure
Pallets, like pallet racks, are in many ways unsung heroes of the supply chain industry. They literally carry products on their backs and are the foundation of our whole system of transporting and storing products. There are many factors to take into account when thinking about how your products, logistics, pallets and racking interact.
At a basic level, most operations need pallets that are good enough for their needs but not much better than that. This is because most shipments are one-way, where the pallets only have to survive the single trip and won’t be collected again by your facility. Together, this means that many facilities get away with the lowest cost and lowest-quality pallets their application allows. However, using a cheap foundation can eventually catch up with you.
As facilities evolve and their products change, the same old pallets may no longer be sufficient for their needs. Products may get larger or heavier, pallet supplier quality may dip over time, the equipment used in the warehouse may change or other things can alter the details of your unit load. When this happens, pallets have a higher chance of breaking or outright failure.
Pallet failure is dangerous and expensive. Workers can be injured, products can be ruined and equipment can be damaged. Even when a snapped board or stressed pallet results in nothing more than time lost, that’s still lost productivity that’s hard to get back.
Lower Risk of Rack Damage or Failure
Nobody wants to deal with a broken pallet, but the effects failures can have on pallet racks can have much larger consequences. Racks are sturdy and dependable but have their engineering limitations. They are at risk to horizontal force since they’re built to withstand downward weight. Racks can also be overloaded as they are used and reused, or put into applications for which they were not designed.
When pallets break or fail, individual items or the whole unit load can slip off the pallet and impact whatever surface is below it. When pallets break during loading or off-loading from the rack system, the rack can absorb the force of thousands of pounds of falling material. Items or loaded pallets landing on a shelf in this way often results in at least some horizontal energy being transferred to the rack. This can create dangerous situations as pallet racks swaying can put undue pressure on its weaker connected parts, such as where the beams and frames are joined or damage struts. Racks, especially ones that are loaded near capacity or have unrepaired damage, can falter in these moments of extreme pressure.
Even in cases of pallet breakage that result in relatively simple rack damage, such as wooden shelving needing replacement, the potential risks are still great since failures of any kind can lead to cascading effects on a shelf or across an entire rack. More mechanically complex racks, such as push back or roller racks, can also be damaged in a way that requires costly fixes while also harming productivity.
Poorer-quality pallets are much more likely to break or fail. At best, these result in time-consuming clean ups and transferring inventory to a new pallet. At worst, workers are injured and warehouse productivity can be tangibly impacted. With the right expertise and a relatively small amount of time, any facility’s cost needs and application requirements can be balanced to find a perfect pallet for the operation. Using pallets of sub-par quality or ones not compatible with your pallet rack safety standards eventually results in being penny-wise but pound-foolish.
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Increase Pallet Rack Safety, While Reducing Costs and Increasing Efficiency
Using higher-quality pallets with designs fitting your operation not only lowers the chance of pallets breaking during use and risking damage to racking systems, they also make economic sense for most facilities. Pallets are the basis for almost every warehouse, and if that base is not optimized there is only so much improvement that can be done around the edges.
Whether the pallets are new, recycled or made from a combination of materials, there is an optimal size and type of pallet for every situation. The following considerations are just a few of the things that should go into deciding what pallet is best for your unique circumstance:
- Pallet weight capacity
- Product size
- Pallet dimensions
- Racking type and dimensions
- Warehouse layout and equipment
- Palletization process
Facilities do best when these different components of an operation are as closely aligned as possible, and pallets are often the most common thing between them. Are your pallets a bit too small for your unit loads? Those pallets and your racks may suffer extra stress from uneven weight distribution. Would you like your palletization process to be faster? Comparing your pallet dimensions with the sizes of your packages can reveal much more efficient ways to create unit loads, allowing you to fit more product on each pallet while reducing transportation costs. Do you use pallets that are smaller or larger than what your equipment is designed to handle? Safety might increase by altering your pallet inventory. All these considerations and more are best handled through a consultation with an experienced pallet design and manufacturing team. Pallet design is a science that can optimize many things. Modern software, like the industry-leading Pallet Design System (PDS) that Pallet Consultants uses, allows for accurate and detailed design simulations. Everything from individual component choice to wood species and palletization method can be entered to give statistics like expected pallet lifecycle and weight capacity.
Many people think pallet design is reserved for new or custom pallets, but recycled pallets can also be enhanced for individual facilities. For example, Pallet Consultants has eight different recycled pallet grades so users can order the exact type of pallet they need. Grades are based on a pallet’s aesthetic qualities and its number and type of repairs. Recycled pallets, especially those of higher grades have weight capacity comparable to new pallets. Each of these grades can also be used in the PDS to show the effects of alternative designs and how well a pallet of a certain grade would work for an application.
The list of possible operational improvements related to pallets is extensive and unique to every facility. At the end of the day, the benefits of a pallet inventory that tightly fits the pallet rack safety plan, application and variety of equipment of a facility will far outsize the small amounts of time or money required to set up and maintain a quality pallet program. Manufacturing, logistics and distribution are all industries with long time horizons. Proper investments in your pallets and maintaining your racking systems in good repair promotes warehouse safety. These are keys to long-term success since operations revolve around their use.