Two Tips for New Manufacturers Who Have Bought Wooden Pallets for Their Facilities
Here are two tips for new manufacturers who have ordered wooden pallets for their facilities.
They should have the pallets inspected regularly and should instruct their staff members to inform them if they discover that a pallet's been damaged
It's important for manufacturers to not only assign the job of inspecting the pallets to one or more of their staff members but to also instruct all of their staff members who have any contact with these pallets to inform their manager if they notice any of the pallets have been damaged.
The reason for this is that although the pallets that are made for use in manufacturing facilities are very robust, they also tend to be routinely subjected to the weight of lots of heavy inventory and are repeatedly loaded onto and off forklifts. If employees sometimes overload the pallets or if the forklift drivers are careless when loading or offloading them, the pallets' wooden panels may splinter, crack or bow. This damage could result in the employees who need to manually pick up items off the pallets getting cuts on their hands from touching the splintered wood, and the cracking or bowing of the pallets may lead to valuable inventory falling off them.
If, however, a manufacturer ensures that their pallets are inspected on, for example, a weekly basis and if they encourage their staff members to report issues with the pallets, the aforementioned types of pallet-related injuries and inventory losses will be greatly reduced, as the manufacturer will be more likely to find out about the damaged pallets and have them fixed before this damage causes problems.
They should store unused pallets in a dry area where there is no direct sunlight
It's also important for new manufacturers to set up a storage area where they can safely store their wooden pallets when they're not in use. This area must be dry (and so should not be located close to, for example, the facility's loading bay area, where the doors might be kept open for hours during the day and where the pallets could, therefore, get rained on) as whilst many pallets are made of treated wood, they can still be damaged by moisture (albeit at a much slower rate than untreated wood). Similarly, the manufacturer should keep their unused pallets out of direct sunlight, as UV light can damage the lignin in wood and so might make the pallets more likely to crack.
Being careful about where they stored their pallets when their staff don't need to use them could save a manufacturer the cost of replacing their pallets prematurely, as well as the potential expenses associated with the pallets breaking unexpectedly, whilst their employees are using them to transport valuable materials.
