Your company must devise a strong pallet management plan to stay ahead of the evolving pallet supply and demand. By staying organized, you can save on costs, simplify your supply chain, manage inventory efficiently, and streamline the retrieval and removal process. Read these tips for establishing a pallet management plan to ensure your business successfully manages its pallets—from inbound to outbound.
Assess Your Pallet Needs
Creating a solid pallet management plan begins with assessing your needs. Ask yourself what sizes, types, and quality of pallets you’ll need. You should also consider the size of your products. A pallet management plan will allow you to have the right pallets for specific products on-hand. It’ll be important to communicate with your pallet distribution company and discuss the types of product and weight loads you’ll be transporting. They’ll be able to determine the types of pallets you’ll want and the materials needed for them. Special distributors like FALM use pallet design software to construct custom-built pallets for various products and weight, further helping to equip you with the exact pallets you’ll need.
Identify Costs and Lead Time
You’ll want to get quotes ahead of time so you can make sure your cost estimates are exact. This will help you make a pallet management plan to provide more savings. You should consider things like lead times in your plan as well. It’s also important to determine when you’ll need more pallets and how many. Buying a whole truck-load will give you a better deal since a partial truck-load will add a delivery fee to make up for the space in the truck. With this laid out in your plan, you’ll have the right number of pallets when you need them for the best price.
Make Procedures Clear To All Employees
Make all pallet management plan procedures clear to your employees. This is an important tip for establishing a pallet management plan because you don’t always know who will be on the clock when pallets arrive and leave. If a worker’s out for the day, you’ll want the person who covered their shift to be just as knowledgeable. Having every employee follow the pallet management plan will ensure they know the number of pallets available and any pallet shipments coming in, keeping your inventory that much more accurate.
Consider Special Services
With pallet services like pallet pick-up, buy back, recycling, and reverse logistics, you can include them in your pallet management plan for extra convenience. For instance, with reverse logistics, you can reuse products and materials and return them directly to your supply chain. As a part of your management plan, have any broken pallets put aside for pick-up, which can go to the buy back or recycling programs. This will lessen the amount of any unusable pallets off your site, alleviating risks of accidents, injuries, or damaged products.
A good pallet management plan includes choosing the right pallet removal company. First Alliance Logistics Management offers removal as well as recycling services like handling baled OCC, baled LDPE, and scrap metals.