Author Nick: TomMoore
Name: Tom Moore
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When to or when not to palletize? More companies are beginning to ask that question as freight costs increase. It was fairly standard to use pallets to mitigate handling costs even at the expense of freight costs, but that is beginning to be questioned now. Some companies are deciding it may not make sense. Here are some examples of why they decide not to palletize.
The concept of a supply chain seems to suggest strong links between supplier, manufacturer, distributor, and customer. But supply chain logistics professionals know this is often far from the truth. Even inside an individual company, the links between functions are weak. In the same plant, the shipping dock is not coordinated with the production planner, purchasing is not aligned with manufacturing and warehousing feels that everything flows down hill from production. We will look at some of the links in this internal supply chain and how they impact logistics performance and then introduce a new class of system that can plan across silos.
Pallet picking is a continuous challenge as each year it seems Consumer Product Company marketing groups create more items while customers want smaller quantities of each item necessitating the break down of unit loads and construction into mixed-case, picked pallets.