You do not need a consultant to find out whether your pallet operation is leaking money. You need three hours, a tape measure and the willingness to count things nobody has counted. Here is the exercise, in the order we run it.
Hour one: count what you have
Walk the site and record every stack: how many pallets, what footprint, what condition, where. Record the broken stack too — especially the broken stack. Most sites discover two things here: they own more pallets than they thought, and a surprising share of the "broken" pile is repairable.
Measure one rack bay properly while you are out there: beam-to-beam clear span, depth, and clear height to the beam above. Nine times out of ten nobody on site has these numbers written down.
Hour two: read the invoices
Pull six months of pallet purchases and six months of waste removal. Add both. That total is your current pallet cost, and it is nearly always higher than the number anybody quotes internally, because the two halves live in different budgets.
- How many pallets did you buy, at what grade, at what price?
- How many purchases were emergencies at spot prices?
- How much did you pay to remove wood — containers, hauls, tipping fees?
- How many forklift hours went into feeding those containers?
Hour three: find the leaks
Three leaks show up in almost every audit. First, sound cores in the scrap stream — wood with resale value going out as waste. Second, grade mismatch: A-grade pallets under loads nobody sees, or #2 pallets in racking where they should not be. Third, storage damage: pallets degrading in the yard between arrival and use.
Write each leak down with a number next to it. The numbers are what make the conversation with your supplier productive.
What to do with the result
If the audit shows under about 1,500 pallets a month, you probably want a standing order plus an on-call removal slot, and nothing more complicated. Above that, a managed programme with an agreed grade standard and a fixed buy-back rate usually pays for itself in the first quarter.
The most common audit finding, by a wide margin: the site was paying to discard pallets of a grade it was simultaneously buying.
We will do this exercise with you for free, and we will tell you if the answer is to change nothing. An audit that ends in no action is still worth three hours, because now the number is known.
Written at the Meeks Blvd yard, St. Louis, and published on July 18, 2023. Markets and specifications move; if a figure here no longer matches what you are seeing, tell us and we will update it. Our model constants live on the Carbon Ledger.
How this was written
Drafted at the grading line from our own weighbridge records, line notes and customer correspondence. Figures quoted as ours are measured; figures quoted from the wider industry are labelled as estimates. Nothing here was written to rank for a search term, and we correct articles rather than quietly deleting them.
- Author
- Yard desk
- Published
- July 18, 2023
- Category
- How-to
- Reviewed
- Annually, with the model constants
- Corrections to
- sales@repalletshop.com
What to do with this
- Check the figures against your own invoices before acting on them.
- Ask us for the underlying scale tickets if you need audit evidence.
- Send the article to whoever owns your pallet spec — most of this is their decision.
- Disagree in writing. Several of these pieces exist because a customer corrected us.
How to cite
Yard desk, “How to audit your pallet operation in one afternoon”, Repallet Shop, July 18, 2023. repalletshop.com/blog/pallet-audit-in-one-afternoon