Complete a Container Load of Pallets

The purpose of this example is to explain how you can use the new (from QPM version 7.5) feature in Quick Pallet Maker that allows the user to increase the number of one or more products in boxes proportionally and achieve a given number of pallets. This is specially useful for making sure that there is no empty space in a shipping container.

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The first step is to run Quick Pallet Maker and open a new Box to Pallet window by selecting File - New Data Sheet - Box on Pallet. Then, we change the units to cm/kg either by right-clicking the label at the bottom-right corner or by using the command in the Tools menu. Finally, we copy and paste the box data that we can download through this link. We then select the 120x100 pallet and set a maximum height of 260 cm. We should see a window like the one below.

After calculating with the Tools - Calculate Box Shipment command, the Available Solutions window should appear with 22 pallets. We then select all of these pallets by using the Edit - Select All command.

The next step is to use the Tools - Fill Container command.

The Container Fill window should appear with the list of 22 pallets that we had selected. We select the Dry Cargo 53 container.

We then use the Tools - Recalculate command or click on the second tab to produce the container fill calculation. We will see that the container fit the 22 pallets, but there's a lot of extra space. The volume efficiency reads 66.41%, which is a lot of waste.

The first step to optimization is finding out the maximum number of single-stack pallets that can fit in the 53 foot container. So we do the following:

• click on the input tab,
• delete the previous pallet list,
• enter manually a 120x100x260 cm pallet with amount = 0
• calculating the container fill

We see that the 53' container can carry 30 120x100 pallets. This is the target for our box shipment on pallets.

We close the Container Fill window and use the Tools - Change Data command in the Available Solutions window to return to the input window with the list of boxes. There we will select the Tools - Advanced Input Options command.

A small window will appear with three tabs. We click on the last tab that says Complete. In the Pallets cell we will enter 30. Then we check the last two boxes (Green and Gray), which will the ones that we will increase proportionally to create 30 pallets. We then click on OK to calculate.

After calculating, we will see the Available Solutions page with 30 pallets. If we see the upper right corner (below Number of Standard Cases), we will notice that the amount of red and blue boxes are the same as before (500 and 250, respectively). But the number of Green Boxes has increased from 300 to 538 (+79%) and the number of Gray Boxes has increased from 500 to 896 (+79%), to fill 30 pallets. We select them and use the Tools - Fill Container command.

We select again the Dry Cargo 53 container and for this exercise we will increase the maximum weight to 30000 kg (30 metric tons).

We select Tools - Recalculate and obtain the fill with 30 pallets full of a combination of the original four types and increased amount of two of them. With the File - Export - to MS Excel command, you can export a file like this one.

Watch the video

This example is also available as a YouTube video.

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