To sort or not to sort – that is the question pallet
recyclers ask themselves every day. Sorting can increase your production and make your
operation more efficient. In short, it can make you more money. But the reverse is also
true. Sorting can become an expense, difficult to handle, and a nightmare to supervise.
The answer to the sorting question is not simple. There are a lot of other questions that
only you can answer.
Before getting into the benefits of sorting, there may be reasons why
you do not want to sort. The first consideration should be your daily pallet volume. If
you are doing less than 1,200 pallets per day, you should not consider sorting. The extra
cost of sorting, whether done with or without equipment, is not justified. If you are
doing a low volume, it makes more sense to deliver the pallets from the truck straight to
your repair workers. Or you could send your builders to the dock to sort for a couple of
hours, then bring the pallets into the shop for repairs.
Some large, successful pallet recyclers will not sort regardless of the
method. These shops believe their people are the key: if the builders are trained well and
doing their job properly, there should be no reason to sort pallets. For example, Al
Keepman of The Pallet Company in Waukesha, Wis., once told me that he would never sort a
pallet. He believes his people are trained well and managed well. His builders make As
into As and Bs into Bs, and they take out the odd sizes for resale. Unfortunately, not all
recyclers have the same luxury.
Don Matre of Pallet Services in Tonawanda, N.Y. had an idea that he
thought would increase the number of As he got per truck load. Since an A pallet sells for
$2.00 to $3.00 more than a B pallet, the more As you end up with, the better. He had
workers sort out all the As and the builders made As from them; then they sorted the Bs
and the builders made Bs from them. His idea worked. He saw a 10 percent increase in the
number of As per truckload.
Since it is easier to turn a pallet into a B rather than an A, some
builders consistently will produce more Bs. The boards do not have to be in as good a
shape. If you leave this decision up to the builder, some will choose to make a B out of
what could have been an A; with the price difference between As and Bs, you lose money
whenever they make that choice. With a trailer load of 440 pallets, a 10 percent increase
in the number of As per load means an additional $132 per day in revenues.
Training is what it is all about. Training has to be a never-ending
process. If a builder can get away with something, they will, so your managers must have a
presence in the shop. Your manager has to be out there where the action is. Remember, the
better a builder is at building a pallet, the more ways he will know how to cheat. If your
manager is not out there, some employees may cheat. If you are paying piece rate, the more
pallets they get credit for, the more money they make, so they have an incentive to try to
slip a few extra pallets by you. By paying an hourly wage, you remove this temptation. But
if a builder gets paid the same whether they make 200 per day or 300 per day, why would he
make the effort to build more than 200? So you need a management presence in the shop.
If you buy cores from freelancers, never sort these incoming pallets.
Require the freelancers to sort them – make it a condition of payment. Save them up
in the yard until there are enough to keep your builders busy for a day. That will save
you a day’s sorting costs and also will allow you to bring the stackers into the shop
and let your builders use them for the day.
With large volume, sorting probably becomes necessary. But there still
are a couple of questions to answer. Do you sort manually, or do you automate? Secondly,
do you sort before the pallet gets to the builder, or after the builder is done? What
about plating?
You can make rapid adjustments with your personnel to maximize
flexibility. When sales slow down, for example, you can move to a four-day work week. You
can cut back to 32 hours per week if necessary. You can also lay people off for a week or
two from time to time. You have a lot of options.
Most people think that in order to have a large, successful shop you
have to have a lot of equipment. Equipment can be very affective. Equipment can increase
profits. Equipment can make you money. But equipment can also become a monster that has to
be fed. When you buy equipment, you turn it on and you turn it off, but you have to pay
for it seven days a week whether it’s running or not. When you pay a builder by piece
rate, if he doesn’t build any pallets, you don’t pay him any money.
People in the pallet recycling business will tell you that you have to
save labor, save labor, save labor. Many say this is what the machinery can do. But this
is a labor intensive industry. It is hard, rough, brutal work, and you cannot escape the
fact. At some point, somebody has to bend over and pick up that 70-pound pallet. Somebody
will have to turn that pallet over, and somebody will have to make a decision about what
to do with it. No amount of equipment will change this.
Another concern about automation is maintenance. You may have the
volume to make automating worthwhile, but remember: if it is built by man, it will break.
If you need a full-time maintenance man to keep your machines running, that is another
cost. A conveyor system is not very complicated and can be easily maintained. Some
stackers likewise are mechanically fairly simple but others are more complicated. Your
machinery also should be water-proof; if it is not water-proof, I recommend you not buy
it.
When pallets are unloaded off the truck, a decision has to be made
about how to handle them. How many GMAs are there in the load? Are lead boards bad? Can a
pallet be repaired? Should it be dismantled? Does it need plating?
I would rather have
one person making the sorting decisions than 10 people making them. The more people you
have making the decisions, the more opportunities you have for making mistakes. These
mistakes will lead to your customers getting bad pallets back. If you do 1,200 pallets a
day and only 10 percent are bad, that can add up to nearly 2,500 bad pallets per month.
How long will your customers tolerate that?
The traditional method of sorting pallets has been to put a man out in
the yard to sort and stack them by hand. One man should be able to sort between 1,000 and
1,200 pallets per day. It is a very physically demanding job, especially in hot weather.
Just by adding a couple of stackers and some rollers, sorting becomes
much more efficient. With one man feeding the rollers and another man stacking, the pair
probably could move up to 4,000 pallets daily, depending on your volume.
If you sort before pallets go to the builders, the decision-making
process is greatly simplified. You just need to identify and train one or two of your
people to become good sorters. You simplify the process when you limit decisions to one or
two well-trained sorters.
Sorting first also will result in an abundance of odd sizes that are
ready to go straight to your resale pile. I have found that in a truckload of pallets, 85
percent are GMAs and the other 15 percent are odd sizes. By sorting first, these odd-size
pallets are immediately available for resale. A truckload of 440 pallets usually will
contain between 60 and 70 odd-size pallets. If an odd-size pallet makes it to one of your
builders, chances are it will be torn apart. This alone may justify the cost of a sorting
system.
When should you invest in sorting equipment? The key is using
multi-purpose equipment. Never buy equipment that cannot serve multiple uses. Don’t
buy equipment that can only be used on one size pallet. If it cannot handle 90 percent of
the pallets you get, don’t buy it.
For example, if you buy a portable stacker, you can use it for both
sorting and building. Put it out on the dock or in the yard and use it to sort pallets
when they come off the trucks. When the sorting is done, move the stacker inside and set
it up for one of your builders to use. You cannot go wrong with portable stackers.
Remember, once you buy the monster, you have to feed the monster.
I have found that sorting the pallets after the builder is done with
them is even more effective. To sort this way you must have a properly designed system of
conveyors that moves everything to a central location.
There are several advantages to this method. This is how it works.
First, every pallet comes off the truck and goes straight to the builder. Your
well-trained builder inspects the pallet and makes the necessary repairs. The pallet then
goes down a conveyor to a central location. The pallet comes to another man who will do
three things. He picks up each pallet, tips it up, and checks the stringers for cracks.
Then he drops the pallet on waist-high dead rollers to be sure the boards are tight.
Finally, he puts the pallet into the appropriate stacker or stacks it by hand. You
hand-stack the pallet sizes of which you only get 15 to 20 per day, and they go straight
into a stack.
This method gives you a quality check before the pallet goes to the
customer. If the pallet needs plating, the builder turns it upside down. When the sorter
sees the upside-down pallet, he pushes it to the plater. If the plater has time at that
moment, he plates the pallet and then stacks it; otherwise, the plater stacks the pallet
and plates it later.
Depending on your daily volume, you may be able to have one man both
plate and sort. If you are doing less than 1,500 pallets daily, this probably will work.
If your volume is higher, you probably will need one man to plate and one to sort. If one
man does all the plating, he also has to be able to stack. During periods of high volume
or when the sorter has to take a break, the plater must be able to take over and handle
the sorting. This allows for interruptions, such as bathroom breaks and phone calls. There
should always be somebody at the end to keep the line moving. You must have your plater
down line from your sorter; if you plate before you sort and you get 10 to 12 pallets in a
row that need plating, you will have a bottleneck in your system and production will slow
down.
Another advantage of using a conveyor to move pallets to a central
location is that you can also move your scrap wood to the central location. When it gets
there, it will fall off onto another conveyor system to be disposed of by either grinding
or dropping into a box. You get everything away from your builders by using a conveyor
system. You also will be able to group builders in a row to watch them. This will save
space and allow you to monitor their work easily.
Should you plate pallets? About 90 percent of shops plate pallets. The
reason is simple. A plate costs about 10 cents. A pallet that is plated goes from being a
B pallet to an A, and it will sell for about $2.00 more. Some of your customers will not
accept plated pallets; by sorting after repairs, you can give them plate-free pallets. You
have to know what your customers will and will not accept. A lot of pallet shops think
they have to give every builder a plater, but this is not the case whether you sort before
or after repairs.
If you plate before repairs are made, you take yet another decision
away from the builders. A well trained sorter can spot pallets with bad runners and plate
them on the dock. This will speed up your builders and allow them to produce more pallets.
With a two-man sorting system, it is quite easy for one sorter to use a hand-held plating
device.
By introducing a lead board remover into your sorting system, damaged
lead boards can be removed before the pallet gets to the builder. Again, by removing this
decision from the builder, he can produce more pallets.
By plating and removing damaged lead boards during the sorting process,
you should be able to increase builders’ production by 25 percent or more.
Inventory control is essential to your bottom line. You absolutely have
to know how many pallets a particular customer gave you and how many you have to return to
them. You also have to know how many pallets every sorter sorted, every tow motor driver
hauled, and every builder made. Without this information, things can and will get out of
control. Luckily, there are some very easy methods to capture this information.
To count the number of pallets a particular customer gave you, assign a
color to each company. Before the pallets go to the builder, simply spray a line of paint
of the appropriate color on the entire stack of pallets. At the end of the line, the tow
motor driver can look at the color of paint on each pallet, which will tell him the number
of As and Bs and odd sizes each company is getting as a finished product. This way, when
you pay each company for the pallets they gave you for repair, you will have an exact
count. You get exactly what you have coming, and your customers get exactly what they have
coming. They don’t want to be over-charged, and you don’t want to give away
pallets. Your customers will appreciate this. You can bring them in and show them your
system, and they will see that they get an exact count every time. If you don’t sort
and leave the counting up to your builders, things can – and often do – get out
of hand.
To easily keep track of how many pallets a builder repairs, have the
forklift driver count them when the pallets come off the truck. Write the number of
pallets down on a piece of paper. When the pallets are delivered to the builder, have him
count them and sign the paper, agreeing with the number delivered. Then have him initial
each pallet with sidewalk chalk and process the stack.
Any pallets that cannot be repaired and have to be dismantled are sent
down the line to be hand-stacked. When the forklift driver takes them to the dismantler,
he looks at the initials on the pallets and records the number on the same paper used to
document the number of pallets delivered to the builder. This way you only pay the builder
for the pallets he made.
The final advantage of this method involves pallets that make it to the
end that are not repaired properly. When this happens and no inventory control system is
used, how do you know which builder performed the work? If their initials are on the
pallet, you know exactly who made it – and which builder to give it back to for
reworking.
There are shops that never sort, and there are shops that always sort.
There also probably are shops that sort which should not, and vice versa.
Sorting is an important decision, and you must not make it quickly. As
I have shown above, there are a lot of factors that go into the decision. Every shop is
different, and every situation is different.
(Editor’s Note: Clarence Leising worked in management positions
for pallet recycling companies in the Northeast for 25 years and currently is a sales
representative and recycling specialist for Bronco Pallet Systems Inc. He may be contacted
by calling (800) 990-7872.)
To sort or not to sort – that is the question pallet
recyclers ask themselves every day. Sorting can increase your production and make your
operation more efficient. In short, it can make you more money. But the reverse is also
true. Sorting can become an expense, difficult to handle, and a nightmare to supervise.
The answer to the sorting question is not simple. There are a lot of other questions that
only you can answer.
Before getting into the benefits of sorting, there may be reasons why
you do not want to sort. The first consideration should be your daily pallet volume. If
you are doing less than 1,200 pallets per day, you should not consider sorting. The extra
cost of sorting, whether done with or without equipment, is not justified. If you are
doing a low volume, it makes more sense to deliver the pallets from the truck straight to
your repair workers. Or you could send your builders to the dock to sort for a couple of
hours, then bring the pallets into the shop for repairs.
Some large, successful pallet recyclers will not sort regardless of the
method. These shops believe their people are the key: if the builders are trained well and
doing their job properly, there should be no reason to sort pallets. For example, Al
Keepman of The Pallet Company in Waukesha, Wis., once told me that he would never sort a
pallet. He believes his people are trained well and managed well. His builders make As
into As and Bs into Bs, and they take out the odd sizes for resale. Unfortunately, not all
recyclers have the same luxury.
Don Matre of Pallet Services in Tonawanda, N.Y. had an idea that he
thought would increase the number of As he got per truck load. Since an A pallet sells for
$2.00 to $3.00 more than a B pallet, the more As you end up with, the better. He had
workers sort out all the As and the builders made As from them; then they sorted the Bs
and the builders made Bs from them. His idea worked. He saw a 10 percent increase in the
number of As per truckload.
Since it is easier to turn a pallet into a B rather than an A, some
builders consistently will produce more Bs. The boards do not have to be in as good a
shape. If you leave this decision up to the builder, some will choose to make a B out of
what could have been an A; with the price difference between As and Bs, you lose money
whenever they make that choice. With a trailer load of 440 pallets, a 10 percent increase
in the number of As per load means an additional $132 per day in revenues.
Training is what it is all about. Training has to be a never-ending
process. If a builder can get away with something, they will, so your managers must have a
presence in the shop. Your manager has to be out there where the action is. Remember, the
better a builder is at building a pallet, the more ways he will know how to cheat. If your
manager is not out there, some employees may cheat. If you are paying piece rate, the more
pallets they get credit for, the more money they make, so they have an incentive to try to
slip a few extra pallets by you. By paying an hourly wage, you remove this temptation. But
if a builder gets paid the same whether they make 200 per day or 300 per day, why would he
make the effort to build more than 200? So you need a management presence in the shop.
If you buy cores from freelancers, never sort these incoming pallets.
Require the freelancers to sort them – make it a condition of payment. Save them up
in the yard until there are enough to keep your builders busy for a day. That will save
you a day’s sorting costs and also will allow you to bring the stackers into the shop
and let your builders use them for the day.
With large volume, sorting probably becomes necessary. But there still
are a couple of questions to answer. Do you sort manually, or do you automate? Secondly,
do you sort before the pallet gets to the builder, or after the builder is done? What
about plating?
You can make rapid adjustments with your personnel to maximize
flexibility. When sales slow down, for example, you can move to a four-day work week. You
can cut back to 32 hours per week if necessary. You can also lay people off for a week or
two from time to time. You have a lot of options.
Most people think that in order to have a large, successful shop you
have to have a lot of equipment. Equipment can be very affective. Equipment can increase
profits. Equipment can make you money. But equipment can also become a monster that has to
be fed. When you buy equipment, you turn it on and you turn it off, but you have to pay
for it seven days a week whether it’s running or not. When you pay a builder by piece
rate, if he doesn’t build any pallets, you don’t pay him any money.
People in the pallet recycling business will tell you that you have to
save labor, save labor, save labor. Many say this is what the machinery can do. But this
is a labor intensive industry. It is hard, rough, brutal work, and you cannot escape the
fact. At some point, somebody has to bend over and pick up that 70-pound pallet. Somebody
will have to turn that pallet over, and somebody will have to make a decision about what
to do with it. No amount of equipment will change this.
Another concern about automation is maintenance. You may have the
volume to make automating worthwhile, but remember: if it is built by man, it will break.
If you need a full-time maintenance man to keep your machines running, that is another
cost. A conveyor system is not very complicated and can be easily maintained. Some
stackers likewise are mechanically fairly simple but others are more complicated. Your
machinery also should be water-proof; if it is not water-proof, I recommend you not buy
it.
When pallets are unloaded off the truck, a decision has to be made
about how to handle them. How many GMAs are there in the load? Are lead boards bad? Can a
pallet be repaired? Should it be dismantled? Does it need plating?
I would rather have
one person making the sorting decisions than 10 people making them. The more people you
have making the decisions, the more opportunities you have for making mistakes. These
mistakes will lead to your customers getting bad pallets back. If you do 1,200 pallets a
day and only 10 percent are bad, that can add up to nearly 2,500 bad pallets per month.
How long will your customers tolerate that?
The traditional method of sorting pallets has been to put a man out in
the yard to sort and stack them by hand. One man should be able to sort between 1,000 and
1,200 pallets per day. It is a very physically demanding job, especially in hot weather.
Just by adding a couple of stackers and some rollers, sorting becomes
much more efficient. With one man feeding the rollers and another man stacking, the pair
probably could move up to 4,000 pallets daily, depending on your volume.
If you sort before pallets go to the builders, the decision-making
process is greatly simplified. You just need to identify and train one or two of your
people to become good sorters. You simplify the process when you limit decisions to one or
two well-trained sorters.
Sorting first also will result in an abundance of odd sizes that are
ready to go straight to your resale pile. I have found that in a truckload of pallets, 85
percent are GMAs and the other 15 percent are odd sizes. By sorting first, these odd-size
pallets are immediately available for resale. A truckload of 440 pallets usually will
contain between 60 and 70 odd-size pallets. If an odd-size pallet makes it to one of your
builders, chances are it will be torn apart. This alone may justify the cost of a sorting
system.
When should you invest in sorting equipment? The key is using
multi-purpose equipment. Never buy equipment that cannot serve multiple uses. Don’t
buy equipment that can only be used on one size pallet. If it cannot handle 90 percent of
the pallets you get, don’t buy it.
For example, if you buy a portable stacker, you can use it for both
sorting and building. Put it out on the dock or in the yard and use it to sort pallets
when they come off the trucks. When the sorting is done, move the stacker inside and set
it up for one of your builders to use. You cannot go wrong with portable stackers.
Remember, once you buy the monster, you have to feed the monster.
I have found that sorting the pallets after the builder is done with
them is even more effective. To sort this way you must have a properly designed system of
conveyors that moves everything to a central location.
There are several advantages to this method. This is how it works.
First, every pallet comes off the truck and goes straight to the builder. Your
well-trained builder inspects the pallet and makes the necessary repairs. The pallet then
goes down a conveyor to a central location. The pallet comes to another man who will do
three things. He picks up each pallet, tips it up, and checks the stringers for cracks.
Then he drops the pallet on waist-high dead rollers to be sure the boards are tight.
Finally, he puts the pallet into the appropriate stacker or stacks it by hand. You
hand-stack the pallet sizes of which you only get 15 to 20 per day, and they go straight
into a stack.
This method gives you a quality check before the pallet goes to the
customer. If the pallet needs plating, the builder turns it upside down. When the sorter
sees the upside-down pallet, he pushes it to the plater. If the plater has time at that
moment, he plates the pallet and then stacks it; otherwise, the plater stacks the pallet
and plates it later.
Depending on your daily volume, you may be able to have one man both
plate and sort. If you are doing less than 1,500 pallets daily, this probably will work.
If your volume is higher, you probably will need one man to plate and one to sort. If one
man does all the plating, he also has to be able to stack. During periods of high volume
or when the sorter has to take a break, the plater must be able to take over and handle
the sorting. This allows for interruptions, such as bathroom breaks and phone calls. There
should always be somebody at the end to keep the line moving. You must have your plater
down line from your sorter; if you plate before you sort and you get 10 to 12 pallets in a
row that need plating, you will have a bottleneck in your system and production will slow
down.
Another advantage of using a conveyor to move pallets to a central
location is that you can also move your scrap wood to the central location. When it gets
there, it will fall off onto another conveyor system to be disposed of by either grinding
or dropping into a box. You get everything away from your builders by using a conveyor
system. You also will be able to group builders in a row to watch them. This will save
space and allow you to monitor their work easily.
Should you plate pallets? About 90 percent of shops plate pallets. The
reason is simple. A plate costs about 10 cents. A pallet that is plated goes from being a
B pallet to an A, and it will sell for about $2.00 more. Some of your customers will not
accept plated pallets; by sorting after repairs, you can give them plate-free pallets. You
have to know what your customers will and will not accept. A lot of pallet shops think
they have to give every builder a plater, but this is not the case whether you sort before
or after repairs.
If you plate before repairs are made, you take yet another decision
away from the builders. A well trained sorter can spot pallets with bad runners and plate
them on the dock. This will speed up your builders and allow them to produce more pallets.
With a two-man sorting system, it is quite easy for one sorter to use a hand-held plating
device.
By introducing a lead board remover into your sorting system, damaged
lead boards can be removed before the pallet gets to the builder. Again, by removing this
decision from the builder, he can produce more pallets.
By plating and removing damaged lead boards during the sorting process,
you should be able to increase builders’ production by 25 percent or more.
Inventory control is essential to your bottom line. You absolutely have
to know how many pallets a particular customer gave you and how many you have to return to
them. You also have to know how many pallets every sorter sorted, every tow motor driver
hauled, and every builder made. Without this information, things can and will get out of
control. Luckily, there are some very easy methods to capture this information.
To count the number of pallets a particular customer gave you, assign a
color to each company. Before the pallets go to the builder, simply spray a line of paint
of the appropriate color on the entire stack of pallets. At the end of the line, the tow
motor driver can look at the color of paint on each pallet, which will tell him the number
of As and Bs and odd sizes each company is getting as a finished product. This way, when
you pay each company for the pallets they gave you for repair, you will have an exact
count. You get exactly what you have coming, and your customers get exactly what they have
coming. They don’t want to be over-charged, and you don’t want to give away
pallets. Your customers will appreciate this. You can bring them in and show them your
system, and they will see that they get an exact count every time. If you don’t sort
and leave the counting up to your builders, things can – and often do – get out
of hand.
To easily keep track of how many pallets a builder repairs, have the
forklift driver count them when the pallets come off the truck. Write the number of
pallets down on a piece of paper. When the pallets are delivered to the builder, have him
count them and sign the paper, agreeing with the number delivered. Then have him initial
each pallet with sidewalk chalk and process the stack.
Any pallets that cannot be repaired and have to be dismantled are sent
down the line to be hand-stacked. When the forklift driver takes them to the dismantler,
he looks at the initials on the pallets and records the number on the same paper used to
document the number of pallets delivered to the builder. This way you only pay the builder
for the pallets he made.
The final advantage of this method involves pallets that make it to the
end that are not repaired properly. When this happens and no inventory control system is
used, how do you know which builder performed the work? If their initials are on the
pallet, you know exactly who made it – and which builder to give it back to for
reworking.
There are shops that never sort, and there are shops that always sort.
There also probably are shops that sort which should not, and vice versa.
Sorting is an important decision, and you must not make it quickly. As
I have shown above, there are a lot of factors that go into the decision. Every shop is
different, and every situation is different.
(Editor’s Note: Clarence Leising worked in management positions
for pallet recycling companies in the Northeast for 25 years and currently is a sales
representative and recycling specialist for Bronco Pallet Systems Inc. He may be contacted
by calling (800) 990-7872.)
