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How Much Does a Plastic Pallet Cost?
ARTICLE UPDATED ON JULY 26, 2023 It’s not just your eyes playing tricks on you or your imagination running wild: you really seeing more plastic pallets stacked on the floors of shopping warehouses like Costco, a shift that seems to have happened overnight as the cost of and competition for lumber has never been fiercer.…
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Kaizen Ideas for the Warehouse That Will Improve Productivity
ARTICLE UPDATED ON JANUARY 31, 2024 The journey of Kaizen business strategies has been remarkable since Toyota pioneered them in Japan’s post-war reconstruction in the late 1940s. It was Toyota’s integration of Kaizen into its foundational “Toyota Way” principles that many believe set the gold standard for lean manufacturing. Kaizen approaches not only center on waste reduction…
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Idle Pallet Storage: What You Need to Know to Keep Your Warehouse Safe
Whether they belong to your company’s internal pallet pool or are merely waiting to be disposed of, tall stacks of pallets are almost inevitable at warehouses and distribution centers. The location of these pallet stacks is also often haphazard, as employees pile pallets wherever they can in order to free up space. But idle shipping…
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Pallet Industry Trends and What They Mean for Your Supply Chain
There is little doubt that our world is changing. Technology has made a lifestyle that would have been unimaginable a decade ago an everyday reality. Films and communications are available wherever we happen to find ourselves, and the furnishings, food, and devices that we fill our homes with are ordered online and delivered with just…
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5 Supply Chain Improvement Opportunities That Can Lower Costs
Logistics is often the most expensive part of running a business. That broad term covers the processing, storage, and transportation of not only your products but also the components or ingredients used to make them. If any one of those elements isn’t perfectly coordinated with the others, your Total Cost of Business (TCOB) can needlessly…
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Pallet Requirements for Export: What to Know
ARTICLE UPDATED ON AUGUST 11, 2023 Discovering a new overseas market for your product can be truly exhilarating. While establishing a niche market domestically contributes to a successful business, venturing into foreign markets elevates your brand to a global scale, even if that market happens to be just across the border in Canada or Mexico.…
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How to Improve Food Traceability with the Right Shipping Pallet
On the 13th of March in 2018, the first illness in what would become a national outbreak of E. coli linked to romaine lettuce was reported. The outbreak went on for four months before ending in June and 210 people in 36 states were affected. Even though the outbreak was traced back to farms in…
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How to Build an Ethical Supply Chain (and Why)
Over 80 percent of U.S. consumers say they would buy from a company that advocated for a cause they cared about and 75 percent say they would refuse to purchase from a company that supported a cause they disagreed with. Americans are increasingly making statements with their purchases. They want to be sure that the…
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Why Choose a Pooled Pallet Rental Program?
There’s a reason most of the large companies you can think of depend on a pallet rental program for the shipping pallets they need to deliver their goods. Pallets are absolutely critical to the supply chain and have been for nearly a century, yet despite this, few companies have mastered the art of pallet management.…
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Shipping Pallet Market Analysis and Trends
Analyzing the shipping pallet market is a difficult task, and drawing firm conclusions about future trends is harder still. The pallet market is divided into two separate worlds: that of large pallet pools which offer multi-use pallets on an international scale, and the more fragmented world of single-use stringer pallets. Making things even more complicated,…
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Plastic vs. Wood Pallets: Choosing a Shipping Pallet Material
Executives paid more attention to the supply chain in 2018 than they have in decades. One big reason was increasing transportation costs, which will continue to threaten profit margins into 2019 as contributing factors, like the truck driver shortage, persist. There is a silver lining to all this, though. Logistics operations have been conducted for…
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Optimizing the Grocery Supply Chain
Most of the attention-grabbing headlines around the grocery supply chain have to do with Amazon, Whole Foods, and the future of grocery delivery to the home. It’s a tricky model to get right, and even Amazon hasn’t quite managed to make home grocery delivery safe, profitable, and attractive for the general public. Yet, in spite…