10 WESTERN PALLET
The most interesting part of the tour for me, was seeing how large the new pallet market is in that area. Out in our Western regions, we have such a large market for recycled GMA pallets, while much of what I saw in Houston, was custom sized new build. What I enjoyed most was seeing all of the lumber milling going on at the facilities visited.
To our WPA membership who weren’t able to make the trip: I think this is a huge benefit to our industry to see what other operations are doing, sharing ideas and finding ways that we can work as an industry to solve common issues. It is very refreshing to find new ways to do things and picking up efficiencies within your own operations.
Carolyn Beach:
CHEP to Invest $240 Million in Pallet Repair Automation
Wooden pallet repair has traditionally been a very labor intensive and manual enterprise. CHEP is not a newcomer to introducing automation to the repair process, and it intends to accelerate that process through strategic investment.
In fact, CHEP initiated its automation journey in Europe more than a decade ago, noted Carmelo Alonso-Bernaola, Senior VP, Global Supply Chain for Brambles. He was speaking at a recent Brambles presentation in London. Those first efforts focused on separating forklift and pedestrian traffic through integrating sorting and repair processes.
One of the challenges for repair automation has been the condition of damaged pallets. “Whenever pallets are coming back to our plants they are broken,” he said. “When they are broken they don’t move as smoothly through any kind of automation.”
The company succeeded in developing automation earlier in Europe than in the U.S. Alonso-Bernaola remarked that the different regions had separate challenges. In the U.S., he said, the urgency for automation did not exist. He pointed out that “back in 2010, the US economy dropped down and unemployment rates reached above 10% so there was easy access to labor, so they didn’t invest in automation.”
In Europe, however, CHEP continued to invest in high volume infeed lines, automated digital inspection