In the run-up to the 1984 National Wooden Pallet & Container Association (NWPCA) Leadership Conference, tensions were running high for Virginia Tech’s Pallet Design System™ (PDS) team. “We were sweating bullets,” recalled Dr. Marshall (Mark) White, the project manager and spokesperson for the project at the time.
Researchers were in what was supposed to be the home stretch of the four-year project launched in 1980, but the final delivery still seemed nowhere close at hand. The pioneering public-private partnership included three groups: the Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) and Virginia Tech, each contributing three scientists in-kind to the project, and NWPCA, which had invested $250,000. And as everyone I interviewed for this article would remind me at some point, a quarter million was a “big investment” back in 1980.
By the start of the fourth year of the project, voluminous research on wood species performance, joints, notches, etc. had been aggregated. Graduate students were, in no small part, getting their degrees by breaking boards to test wood properties, as White joked. There was just one not-so-small problem. Researchers at Virginia Tech, having translated that modeling into software, were having problems. They couldn’t get the software to work on their first desktop computers.
“I’m pulling my hair out because we were all doing our best,” White recalled of the research team. He appealed for more time to Bill Sardo, the NWPCA executive vice president emeritus, but Sardo would not hear it. The introduction of PDS was the must-see presentation on the NWPCA meeting agenda, which had been organized around it.
The clock was ticking – only days until the conference – where PDS would be formally introduced, and Dr. Thomas McLain of Virginia Tech, the project’s lead scientist, couldn’t get the program to run. “He wasn’t a source code developer,” White recalled. “And neither was I.”
Finally, just a day before McLean and White were flying to Boca Raton for the meeting, there was jubilation. McLain got the program to work.
That jubilation turned out to be short-lived. After the flight, White and McLain brought their 5¼” floppies to the conference room to get set up. However, when the PC was connected to the massive 1980s-era projector (it was big as a desk, as White recalled), the program crashed. The researchers found out from the resort IT staff that the IBM PC was manufactured locally in Boca Raton, and IBM technicians were called to the scene. After arriving, they assured McLain and White they would fix the problem and return the PC in the morning.
True to their word, they arrived the next morning and helped set up the presentation equipment. Finally, things were going according to plan. As Sardo introduced White to the packed presentation hall, McLain took his position behind the stage curtain, where he was hidden from the audience. During the presentation, McLain would run the PDS demonstration on White’s signal.
However, as White passed McLain on the way to the podium, McLean hissed from backstage, “Mark, it’s not working.” White, with a knot in his stomach, introduced PDS and went through some introductory PowerPoint slides in front of a brimming audience of over 400 pallet people, not having a clue how things would unfold.
Then it was time for McLain to do the demonstration, and miraculously, the program worked. The demo went off flawlessly, and at the end, McLain was called to the front of the stage. Both men received an electric, unforgettable ovation. Although PDS 1.0 would not be released until later in the year, it had been successfully and impressively introduced to the NWPCA membership.
The Beginnings of Computerized Pallet Design
While the Pallet Design Program (officially the Research and Development Project for Developing Design Technology for Wooden Pallets) was launched in 1980 to develop PDS, the history of computerized pallet design began a few years earlier. NWPCA members from Missouri (Jack Angelbeck) and Ohio (Jake Phillips) along with a few other industry leaders had been working with Dr. Walt Wallin of the Princeton WV Forest Products Laboratory to develop a computerized design system that would run on a Wang type minicomputer. They also collaborated with Dr. Jay Johnson and Dr. E. George Stern of Virginia Tech. Dr. Johnson was White’s faculty advisor before completing his doctorate. Johnson came up with a crude pallet design program called PalAnal.
Not surprisingly, for a first attempt, the software had limitations. “The biggest concern with the original program was the way they were modeling the connection,” White said. I don’t want to get too technical, but they were using pin joints, and we all know that pallets have semi-rigid connections. So, the model would generate some misleading results, and it was too narrow in scope, anyway.”
Shortly thereafter, NWPCA got involved at the association level, versus individual member initiatives. As White recalls it, Sardo came to Virginia Tech and met with William Lavery, the then university president and Dr. Stern. He pitched Lavery on the idea of a cooperative program involving the university, USDA Forest Service and NWPCA.
Sardo, already a seasoned negotiator (after all, he had previously broken bread with the infamous Jimmy Hoffa and Teamsters officials back in the 1960s) reached an agreement with the USDAFS, and the director of the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, and Virginia Tech, with those groups supplying three research scientists each and NWPCA providing the $250,000 startup funding. Virginia Tech was chosen to lead the project, and the money would be used to fund graduate students to help with the research.
John Hosner, head of Tech’s Department of Forestry and Wildlife, assigned McLain, White and Dr. Al DeBonis to the project. McLain was tasked with leading the research, while White, who had taken over as director of the W.H. Sardo Pallet and Container Research Laboratory in 1979 after the retirement of Dr. George Stern, was arbitrarily assigned by Hosner to be the project manager and interface between agencies. He would keep track of what everyone was doing and report regularly to the NWPCA. He also worked with source code developers on the design of the Apple and IBM PC user interfaces.
Other roles were assigned to various participants. As the lead, McLain assembled the research into a cohesive methodology. He was supported by DeBonis. Terry Gerhardt of the FPL in Madison, Wisconsin, was tasked with notch analysis, while Tom Wilkinson, also of Madison and 20 years his senior, was responsible for fasteners and connection models. Walt Wallin of the Princeton, West Virginia Forest Products Laboratory produced the durability modeling based on the so-called PEP research during the 1960s.
FPL Contributions
As Gerhardt recalls today, he was hired by FPL as a young researcher to specifically work on the project. He worked at FPL until 1985. He had grown up locally, so the position was an opportunity for him to move back to familiar turf.
His analysis of notches was unrelated to Wilkinson’s work on pallet joints, so the two researchers worked independently. While attending a week-long seminar at MIT that he had been assigned to attend by his supervisor, Gerhardt’s research received a boost. He was listening to a presentation regarding the modeling of cracks in composite material, and he realized that he could modify it to better predict notch performance. The results were positive.
When it was time to test the modeling against physical testing, NWPCA staff arranged for Gerhardt to pick up stringers from one member company and to take them to another company, a machinery manufacturer, where he could notch them in the various configurations needed to support his research.
With his light green USFS pickup truck loaded with stringers, Gerhardt took them to be notched. Back at the lab, the physical test results almost perfectly matched the modeling, and Gerhardt couldn’t have been happier.
The Role of Virginia Tech Grad Students
Nine graduate students were involved in PDS research, four of whom participated in the initial project. One of the initial graduate researchers was Joe Loferski, who would go on to receive his PhD in 1985 and become a faculty member at Virginia Tech. “I was the principal author of the first version of it,” he told me. “I wrote the structural analysis part of it for rack across stringers and rack across deck boards.” He wrote the basic code for the original version of PDS, which was included in his doctoral dissertation.
At the beginning of the Pallet Design Program in 1980, Loferski noted that putting PDS on a PC wasn’t even a consideration. PCs had not entered the market. Over the course of the project, however, personal computers were introduced to the marketplace and eventually became central to delivering PDS to pallet manufacturers.
One of the things Loferski remembers fondly is that the development team was a tight-knit group that was focused on the project’s success. The weekly meetings brought everyone together to review their progress and chart the following week’s activities. “It was fun in that regard,” he said. It was an interesting counterpoint from the lead professors, who found the process more stressful than invigorating.
John McLeod was another crucial graduate student. In 1982 and 1983, he was involved in research on material property values for wood pallet parts. White was so impressed with McLeod’s work that he offered him a job after his graduation.
“Over those years when he and I worked together, he did the coding,” White recalled. He became a self-taught programmer.” McLeod did the “guts of the work,” while White did the interface design work to ensure it was user-friendly.
After the release of PDS 1.0 in November 1984, there was initially an ongoing stream of work to fix bugs in the program, with White fielding the phone calls and McLeod doing the debugging. Printer compatibility was an early issue that posed some challenges.
Ongoing updates followed, along with PDS training courses at Virginia Tech and presentations at NWPCA events. As for McLeod, John would spend his entire career involved with PDS, first at Virginia Tech and later at NWPCA. I last talked to John at the FEFPEB Conference in Maastricht, Netherlands, in 2017. I unsuccessfully attempted to make contact for this article.
PDS Legacy
PDS was hugely successful on multiple levels. As an invaluable product, it has enabled pallet manufacturers to make pallets with greater confidence and often less material, translating into better customer experience, cost savings and sustainability gains. It was also a shining example of a hugely successful public–private partnership, one that was initiated against all odds in the Reagan era climate of public sector defunding. People in the public sector, like Gerhardt, were constantly looking over their shoulders.
“I think it’s just a great and underappreciated story,” Gerhardt said, looking back. To this day, he remains puzzled that the USFS did not celebrate their participation in the success of the project. It was kept out of the limelight. He speculated that perhaps his managers did that purposefully to ensure that the project wasn’t killed prematurely. After all, just “mom and pop” companies were involved, not dominant forestry industry firms that held sway with Congress.
John Healy, who was the president of the NWPCA between 1987 and 1999, recalled the surge of credibility that PDS brought to the industry and association. In fact, while he was being recruited for the job, he was surprised to learn that NWPCA had such software.
“Back in the mid-80s, CAD software was a big deal because all the leading industries had some type of CAD design that they were using,” he recalled. “And here was this pallet association that had this CAD software, and I remember being very impressed that an industry made up of all these entrepreneurial, family-owned businesses, had the foresight to develop something like this.”
Healy recalled the excitement of the membership and packed audiences in the years that followed when annual PDS updates were given at NWPCA meetings.
Today, PDS is available in 40 countries and counting. Looking back at the success of PDS, Brent McClendon, the current CEO of NWPCA, underscored the role of industry leaders of the day in investing in the collaborative project. “We had visionary leaders at the very beginning. They not only created the energy behind PDS, but subsequently, many of these same people went on to form the Pallet Foundation in 1996 that has continued the significant PDS R&D funding we see today” he said.
He noted that this future-forward spirit lives on in the new leadership teams of multi-generational pallet businesses. “They want to continue to build off of the shoulders of the people who were here before them,” McClendon said. “They want to keep that vision and innovation alive.”
The Pallet Foundation is the primary funding source for the ongoing research and development of PDS with contributions from NWPCA members and others in the industry. While PDS continues to expand worldwide, the beginnings of the association-owned software were made possible by the original collaboration begun in 1980.
“The most profound thing about this project isn’t necessarily the result, which in itself has been amazing,” White reflected. “It was the fact that for one of the first times in this whole sector, the federal government, state government and private industry got together to pull something like this off. It was remarkable to have this cooperation between the federal and state governments and private industry.
“Sure, there were some initial glitches,” he continued, “but PDS is obviously one of the greatest research successes here at Virginia Tech, and certainly within the college and the department. You can appreciate, it was a monstrous program.”
Today, we take it for granted. But for a moment at least, take a moment to reflect on the incredible effort, angst and inspiration that made the PDS story possible.
This article included telephone interviews with John Healy, CEO of NWPCA between 1987 and 1999, Dr. Terry Gerhardt (formerly of FPL and retired), Dr. Joe Loferski (Virginia Tech), Brent McClendon (NWPCA), and Dr. Marshall (Mark) White (Virginia Tech and White & Company). Attempts to reach out to NWCPA leaders of the day involved in the project proved to be unsuccessful for a variety of health and age-related reasons. This article also was informed by content from History of the Pallet Design System™ which appeared in the March-April 2024 issue of PalletCentral.
