Learn How to Reduce Product Damage During Transportation
large piles of plastic pallet stacks

How to Reduce Product Damage During Transportation

How to Reduce Product Damage During Transportation

Damage prevention in logistics is a critical issue. If you are to be successful in your industry, you must be able to consistently get your goods from one end of the supply chain to the other in one piece on a consistent basis. Damaged products are a major cause of loss in warehousing, manufacturing and other industries, which is very unfortunate — especially since much of that product damage can be avoided with the proper strategies. Here are some useful tactics for preventing damage along the supply chain.

How to Reduce Product Damage in Warehouse

You can’t keep your product whole during transport if you can’t even get it out of the gate safely. Some damage in the warehouse while trying to retrieve and load merchandise may be inevitable, but much of it can be warded off.

It starts with your pallets. Wooden pallets can have missing nails, faulty planks, broken pieces or other integral weaknesses that are just crying out for an accident when you try to use them for loading. Your best approach may be to replace your wooden pallets with plastic ones that do not splinter, take on moisture or easily lose their integrity at extreme temperatures.

Once you’ve confirmed that your pallets are safe, it’s important to make sure you have loaded them and wrapped your product correctly to avoid a spill or some other kind of accident.

In addition to pallet care, making sure your facility is clean and well-lit is a sure way to reduce product damage in the warehouse.

How to Reduce Transit Damage

Once you’ve gotten the product out of the warehouse, how do you protect it on its way to its destination? Once again, packaging is key. Product damage during transportation is often caused by mistakes in packing. Making sure your products are securely packed and wrapped on the pallet so they don’t jostle or come loose is a great way to keep them safe. Product packaging is usually your smallest expenditure, so the ROI of upgrading your packaging to protect your items can be tremendous when weighed against the cost of product loss.

When packing pallets, make sure the product stays within the dimensions of the pallet without overhanging. Stack heavy boxes in an overlapping pattern, like bricks, which will distribute their weight more evenly and be less likely to topple.

How to Reduce Transit Damage

Other Damage Prevention Tactics

There are many steps you can take to prevent product damage during transportation or warehousing, and if you’re creative you can probably come up with a lot of others. Other tactics can include transporting your material on trucks with air-ride suspension or trucks that make fewer stops, controlling temperature both in your warehouse and in your trucks and using partitions, which can support corrugated boxes to help avoid crushing, prevent products from crashing into each other and make your product easier to unpack on the other end.

Browse Our Material Handling Products

If you’re looking for reliable, reusable, safer plastic pallets for your warehousing and shipping needs, contact Polymer Solutions International Inc. You can send us a note online, talk to us on our website via Live Chat or call us at 610-325-7500. Get in touch today!

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