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by MisterBastahrd 715 days ago
I suppose this would be useful for large supply chains. Once you get away from that and move to shipping from warehouse to store, though, this would be a largely be a waste of time. Stacking a pallet with various different sized boxes and shapes is a bit of an art form that is largely learned through trial and error until you "get" it (I was on a full time night stock crew while I was in college). It would literally take more time for workers to refer to the layout than it would for them to simply stack the goods onto the pallet.
2 comments

Pallet stacking can also be done automatically (with robots), and there are solutions (only privately developed/owned to my knowledge) that calculate optimal stacking for heterogeneous loads - interlock boxes for stability, weight (distribution & total), height, etc. Each box is characterized on induct (weighed, scanned, sometimes manually updated with metadata on crushability/fragility). Then an algo figures out best way to put the boxes on a pallet. I've seen this for grocery, but applicable in other use cases.
It's only time-consuming for workers to follow the planned layout when those workers are human.