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What Are ISO Standard Pallet Dimensions?
ARTICLE UPDATED ON OCTOBER 3, 2023 During the industrial revolution, standardized dimensions for building materials such as screws or girders simply did not exist. In the early twentieth century, national governments began to create standard bodies to deal with the problem. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) was established in 1918 so that projects in…
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How to Make the Most of Supply Chain Automation
If you’ve ever walked into a grocery store–or any sort of store–then you’ve probably seen a stocker scanning individual items before placing them back on the shelf. He or she is checking the stock keeping unit (SKU) to help keep track of what the store has on the shelf, what is still in inventory, and…
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How to Increase Truck Loading Efficiency to Lower Your Cost of Business
In 2013, the Ford Motor Company made headlines by announcing that, instead of steel, its popular F-150 line of pickup trucks would be made almost entirely out of aluminum, from the engine block to the frame. The move sent a shockwave through the automotive world. The high cost of aluminum meant that the change was…
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Why the Dairy Supply Chain Should Use Plastic Pallets
The dairy industry is very aware of the advantages of a plastic pallet. In fact, if you’re shopping around for a pallet for dairy in the 40×40 pallet size, most of the pallets that you’ll see are in fact plastic pallets. Anyone who has ever smelled sour milk will immediately grasp the obvious advantage of…
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How to Prevent Forklift Damage
One of the most persistent problems in logistics supply chains is damage caused by forklifts. It is a constant complication that dogs companies through every phase of their logistics operations by creating additional costs and complicating the delivery of products. Forklift damage comes in several forms: product can be damaged by the forklift as it…
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Solutions for Food Supply Chain Challenges: How the Right Pallet Helps
If you’re in the grocery business you know that margins are tight and you make your money on volume. If you’re a retailer, any disruption to your production or supply chain that delays shipment or renders food unfit to be sold will impact your profit margin. If you’re a manufacturer, a disruption can mean that…
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Warehouse Operations Best Practices: Increasing Efficiency and Safety
If you manage a warehouse or work in logistics, you’ve probably experienced how a sudden influx of products you don’t have space for can disrupt all of your operations. It’s challenging to run a warehouse or distribution center smoothly, and the changing demands of management and consumers complicate operations. Customers and business executives are notoriously…
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How Plastic Pallets Increase Pallet Handling Safety
Injuries in the warehouse are shockingly common. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics put the rate of injury at five per 100 warehouse employees in 2016. In comparison, logging, which is widely recognized as the most dangerous job in America, averaged 3.6 injuries per 100 employees during that same year. The overwhelming majority of warehouse…
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Cold Chain Management for Pharmaceuticals: Choosing a Pallet
One recent Sunday, I checked my apartment’s mailbox to find that the postman had left me a key to one of the lockboxes where the apartment stores packages as they arrive. At first, I was excited; I thought that the new graphics card I’d ordered for my PC had arrived. When I opened the lockbox…
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Green Warehouse Practices: Running an Eco-Friendly Storage Warehouse
In the words of Niall FitzGerald, former CEO of Unilever, “Corporate social responsibility is a hard-edged business decision. Not because it is a nice thing to do or because people are forcing us to do it…because it is good for our business.” Businesses aren’t immune to the consequences of waste and excessive energy consumption; wasted…
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Pharmaceutical Product Transportation: Why Your Pallet Matters
Pharmaceutical products are the result of centuries of insights, years of rigorous research, and the incredible feats of engineering that it took to turn all that science into a reliable production line. Yet, the distribution and transportation of pharmaceuticals is its own difficult field. Pharmaceutical product transportation is one of the biggest challenges in the…
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How to Reduce Product Damage in the Warehouse with Plastic Pallets
No matter what industry you’re in, product damage is frustrating. If you’re in retail, you must carefully sort out damaged products from your shipment, note them, and send them back for credit. If you’re in the warehouse and notice product damage, you also have to find a place to store the damaged product and coordinate…