Mixed palletizing is the job of stacking cases of different products onto one pallet so a single load can serve one store, one customer or one delivery drop. Done well, it saves trailer space and handling at the other end; done badly, it produces leaning, crushed loads that get refused on arrival. (The UK spelling is “palletising”, which we use from here on except where we’re naming the search term.) This guide covers what mixed pallets are, manual versus robotic mixed case palletizing, the order cases should go on, what keeps a load stable, and how a warehouse management system plans and tracks every case on the pallet.<\/p>\n
A mixed pallet carries more than one SKU. The trade often calls it a “rainbow pallet”, because a stack of different cartons in different printed boxes looks like stripes of colour. The opposite is a single-SKU or homogeneous pallet, where every case is identical and the stacking pattern can be repeated layer after layer.<\/p>\n
Mixed pallets exist because customers rarely want a full pallet of one thing. A convenience store wants a few cases of crisps, some soft drinks and a box of cleaning products in the same delivery. A wholesaler’s trade customer orders twenty lines, three cases each. So the warehouse picks cases from many locations and builds them into one load. Dematic’s white paper on automated mixed case palletizing<\/a> describes the work as three stages: breaking down full pallets into cases, buffering and sequencing those cases, then building the mixed pallet.<\/p>\n The reason it’s hard is geometry. Every case has a different footprint, height, weight and crush strength, so there’s no fixed pattern to follow. Researchers writing in the journal Sustainability treat mixed palletizing for smart warehouses<\/a> as an optimisation problem whose aim is high load efficiency through good use of space. Photoneo puts it more plainly in its write-up on mixed-case palletizing with Jacobi Robotics<\/a>: it’s a three-dimensional puzzle that has to be solved in real time, case by case.<\/p>\n It’s also physically hard work. Building pallets by hand means repeated lifting, twisting and reaching to the back of the base, which is exactly the kind of task the HSE’s guidance on manual handling at work<\/a> asks employers to assess and reduce.<\/p>\n Most UK warehouses still build mixed pallets by hand: a picker walks a route with a pallet truck and stacks cases as they’re picked. Robotic mixed case palletizing takes the stacking away from people, and it’s moved fast in the last few years. Here’s how the main approaches compare.<\/p>\nWhere you’ll see mixed pallets<\/h3>\n
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Manual vs robotic mixed case palletizing<\/h2>\n