The first 90 days of a managed pallet programme

Week one: discovery, and the invoices

We walk each site with your operations contact and we read two years of invoices. The walk tells us volumes, grades in actual use, dock constraints and where pallets accumulate. The invoices tell us what is being spent, and they are frequently more surprising than the walk.

The single most common discovery is a site paying to buy pallets and paying a waste hauler to remove pallets in the same month, from the same building. Neither invoice is large enough to attract attention alone. Together they are usually the largest avoidable cost on the site, and they are found by reading rather than by consulting.

Week two: a written specification

Grade by application, written down, and issued to receiving. Not "we use A grade" but: racked storage takes A or B #1; outbound distribution takes B #1; inbound receiving takes B #2; internal movement takes #2 economy. With rejection criteria attached, so a receiving clerk can apply it without judgement calls.

This document is where most of the savings originate. Over-specifying grade is the most expensive habit in pallet purchasing, and it persists because nobody ever writes down which pallets go where.

Weeks three to six: one site, running live

1. Schedule set against real accumulation

   Not a guess. We size the collection cadence and the trailer against what the site actually generates, measured rather than estimated.

2. Paired freight established

   Deliveries and collections combined onto single truck movements wherever geography allows. This is the second-largest saving and it requires nothing from you except telling us.

3. Sort-and-repair stream started

   Damaged units are separated and assessed rather than scrapped. The proportion that needed one deck board is usually higher than anybody expects.

4. Reporting baseline

   First month of weighbridge data, by destination stream. This becomes the number everything afterwards is measured against.

5. Tuning

   Almost everything gets adjusted in weeks five and six. Trailer size, collection day, grade split. The pilot exists to be wrong cheaply.

Weeks seven to twelve: rollout, in volume order

Remaining sites come on largest first, because that is where the learning from the pilot has most value and because it front-loads the saving. Reporting consolidates into a corporate roll-up alongside per-site detail. Invoicing consolidates, with core credits netted against supply.

Appendix: the data behind this

Every piece on this site closes with the slice of our operating record that bears on what it argues. The full record is published at /resources/operating-record.

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