Maintaining an even and flexible pallet supply for your company’s needs may seem as easy as finding a needle in a haystack. Chances are, over the last year or two, you’ve had an issue with either lower supply or increasing costs of wood pallets.
With both supply chain issues and labor shortages causing unexpected delays, you may think the situation is grim.
But with a little planning and understanding of the market forces, you can work out the wrinkles in your operation. It’s important to note that having a strong pallet supplier that is focused on customer service is vital to the continued success of your pallet program.
Supply chain issues continue
Given the events of the past two years, it definitely is hard to predict supply and demand for many industries. Whether it’s lack of product or lack of pallets to transport them on, everyone is trying to forecast what the needs for goods are and how those goods will be moved to their final destination.
Wooden pallets are an important (and sustainably reusable) part of this supply chain issue. Out of the more than 2 billion wooden pallets in circulation, 75 percent of them are remanufactured. The remaining 25 percent are new.
Keeping pallets in good shape and usable has been a challenge due in part to rising lumber costs and other resources needed to maintain an adequate supply of usable pallets.
Hope Timber is a totally full-service manufacturer and pallet/wood recycling company. We buy, sell, build, and remanufacture 48 x 40 and custom-sized pallets. Because pallet transportation offers its own set of challenges, we also own our own fleet of over 100 semi-trailers to handle drop-off and delivery of pallets.
Labor shortages add to all the woes
Supply chain issues can be affected by the amount and cost of raw material, as we have seen. And as we discussed in an earlier post, even causes such as forest fires and excessive rain can affect how easily it is to obtain wood pallets.
But another perhaps less visible aspect of the pallet shortages has been the nationwide shortage of labor for many industries.
Over the course of the last two years, the entire wood manufacturing industry has lost nearly 9,000 jobs. This means there are fewer loggers to harvest the wood and fewer workers to produce the lumber.
On top of the supply and manufacturing issues, getting pallets transported to the right place at the right time has also been a challenge for all types of industries. In fact, the supply chain has been further slowed by the loss of truck drivers to deliver the wood. The pandemic did not start that trend, but it has made it much worse.
Luckily, at Hope Timber, we can quickly deliver throughout central Ohio and surrounding areas with our fleet of more than 100 semi-trailers.
There is some good news
Even with circumstances changing on a seemingly daily basis, we believe that conditions have already started to become less volatile than they were even one year ago.
One of the key strategies to success is your ability to count on our company for a stable, predictable and holistic business model that allows you to be confident in the ability to transport your goods at all times.
Hope Timber is happy to be able to provide stability to our customers through innovative methods of building and remanufacturing our wood pallets. Because we offer our own source of transportation for your pallet needs, we can deliver no matter what the circumstances are.
In addition, if you have wooden pallets, skids, or crates that you don’t need, we can recycle them for you. We offer a variety of services to help with whatever you may need.
To learn more about pallets or find out more about paving the way for a different future for utilizing a no-waste solution with wood, please contact Hope Timber Pallet or call (740) 344-1788.
