Input Stories

Wooden pallets are a critical component of global shipping—so when they go missing or get stolen, their owners call in the professionals (The Wall Street Journal, subscription).

What’s going on: At Brambles, the world’s largest supplier of the wooden platforms, it’s the job of “pallet detectives”—ex-law-enforcement professionals—to “track down leads and hunt out stray pallets so they can be returned to the Australian company, which has a market value of about $14 billion.”

Why it’s important: Each pallet costs around $20, and Brambles owns hundreds of millions. Each month, several million are unaccounted for, leaving the business with “[r]eplacement costs [that] can quickly run to millions of dollars each year.”

• For all their rough-hewn simplicity, pallets are highly prized—and a target of thieves for their resale value.

How they do it: “To help employees in the field, Brambles has screwed around 450,000 GPS trackers onto the blue-painted pallets leased by its [Commonwealth Handling Pool, or] CHEP business.”

• The trackers ping every hour or two to give the company near real-time location information.
• The “detectives” have also used drones to locate the pallets.

Possible fix? “Poolers like CHEP should offer a worthwhile bounty for each stray pallet returned to them,” the president of one supply chain services firm suggested.

• “If that piece of wood sitting behind the store was worth five dollars, guess what you would see? You’d see people running around in pickup trucks all over, picking those things up to cash in—just like water bottles.”