{"id":6622,"date":"2012-10-30T21:16:53","date_gmt":"2012-10-31T02:16:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/?p=6622"},"modified":"2012-10-30T21:17:29","modified_gmt":"2012-10-31T02:17:29","slug":"palletized","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/2012\/10\/palletized\/","title":{"rendered":"palletized"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n[Massive warehouse districts both east and west of I-35 in Laredo, Texas<\/a>, filled with goods shipped across the Mexican border.]<\/em><\/p>\n

Tom Vanderbilt, with a short history of the pallet<\/a>, one of those logistical objects whose dimensions and properties format much of the space we live in, from store shelves to exurban warehouse districts:<\/p>\n

For an invisible object, [pallets] are everywhere: there are said to be billions circulating through global supply chain (2 billion in the United States alone). Some 80 percent of all U.S. commerce is carried on pallets. So widespread is their use that they account for, according to one estimate, more than 46 percent of total U.S. hardwood lumber production.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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Companies like Ikea have literally designed products around pallets: Its \u201cBang\u201d mug, notes Colin White in his book\u00a0Strategic Management<\/em><\/a>, has had three redesigns, each done not for aesthetics but to ensure that more mugs would fit on a pallet (not to mention in a customer\u2019s cupboard). After the changes, it was possible to fit 2,204 mugs on a pallet, rather than the original 864, which created a 60 percent reduction in shipping costs. There is a whole science of \u201cpallet cube optimization,\u201d a kind of Tetris for packaging; and an associated engineering, filled with analyses of \u201cpallet overhang\u201d (stacking cartons so they hang over the edge of the pallet, resulting in losses of carton strength) and efforts to reduce \u201cpallet gaps\u201d (too much spacing between deckboards). The \u201cpallet loading problem,\u201d\u2014or the question of how to fit the most boxes onto a single pallet\u2014is a common\u00a0operations research thought exercise<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Pallet history is both humble and dramatic. As\u00a0Pallet Enterprise<\/em>\u00a0(\u201cFor 30 years the leading pallet and sawmill magazine\u201d) recounts, pallets grew out of simple wooden \u201cskids\u201d, which had been used to help transport goods from shore to ship and were, essentially, pallets without a bottom set of boards, hand-loaded by longshoremen and then, typically, hoisted by winch into a ship\u2019s cargo hold. Both skids and pallets allowed shippers to \u201cunitize\u201d goods, with clear efficiency benefits: \u201cAccording to an article in a 1931 railway trade magazine, three days were required to unload a boxcar containing 13,000 cases of unpalletized canned goods. When the same amount of goods was loaded into the boxcar on pallets or skids, the identical task took only four hours.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the full article<\/a> at Slate<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Massive warehouse districts both east and west of I-35 in Laredo, Texas, filled with goods shipped across the Mexican border.] Tom Vanderbilt, with a short history of the pallet, one of those logistical objects whose dimensions and properties format much of the space we live in, from store shelves to exurban warehouse districts: For an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[751,642,461,621,528],"class_list":["post-6622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asides","tag-formatted-space","tag-keller-easterling","tag-logistics","tag-organization-work","tag-tom-vanderbilt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6622"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6626,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6622\/revisions\/6626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}