REstacking, REsizing and REconfiguring get REsults. What's the difference between 8 and 9? About $230,000.
Packing up an 18-wheeler with GP paper is a little like stuffing the back of your minivan before you leave for vacation. The goal – get in as much as you can. What’s the difference between your trunk and that big rig? Pallets – and lots of them.
Anyone who has tried to move a box of GP paper (the white carton the reams come in) knows paper is heavy. Stacking boxes of paper on pallets and loading pallets on trucks and railcars is a whole lot better than moving one box at a time. And the customers like it that way.
Since the dawn of time (not really but close), paper makers stacked their boxes of paper on pallets that were 47 inches long by 35 1/2 inches wide. That’s eight cases per layer, five layers high. Then, major retailers like Sam’s Club and Costco switched to larger pallets that were 48 inches long and 40 inches wide. No big deal, the industry replied, simply plopping the same amount of paper, with the same footprint, onto a bigger pallet. Or was it?
It turns out that it isn’t very efficient when you don’t use every bit of space on the pallet. You can’t stack pallets as high. The cartons of paper can shift or get damaged, and worst of all you can’t get as many cases on a truck or train. Those things take money away from the bottom line and they mean more trucks and trains.
So what happens when you go after the perfect fit and reconfigure the pallet to hold nine cases of paper per layer and make it four layers tall? Seems like a trick question. It can’t be good to go from 40 cartons on the old pallet to 36 cartons in the new configuration, can it? Yep, you guessed it – it is better – for the bottom line and for the environment. Making this simple switch means more cartons per truck or train, fewer miles traveled, less paperwork and less fuel. Now that’s the perfect pallet.
Did you know that GP has a patent pending to protect the way paper is organized on a pallet? That’s right, our competitors cannot organize their paper using our footprint. How’s that for protecting our intellectual property?