The Center for Packaging and Unit Load Design partnered with White and Company, creators of the Best Load and Best Pallet software packages, to offer its annual Unit Load Design and Performance Short Course entirely online this year. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this course, which is usually held in-person for two full days, was changed to multiple Zoom sessions over the last full week of August 2020. The course had 20 participants from seven U.S. states and two foreign countries (India and Mexico).

Over the course of four afternoons, participants listened to live lectures from both Laszlo Horvath, associate professor in the Department of Sustainable Biomaterials and director of CPULD, and Mark White, professor emeritus at Virginia Tech and president of White and Company, and participated in both group and individual exercises utilizing the design techniques about which they were learning.

This course focused on systems-based design of unit loads. Systems-based design means looking at the distribution supply chain as a whole, consisting of many interacting parts. In the past, corrugated board, packaging, pallets, unit loads, and material handling equipment were all designed separately to provide the best options possible as individual items. Recently, systems-based design has become more popular as it looks at the interactions between these individual items and how to make design decisions based on these interactions. The ultimate goal of design is to balance cost and performance. Over-designing is uneconomical; under-designing can be dangerous.

This short course covered the keys to implementing systems-based design methods, providing the participants with an overall summary of the current research into how packaging, pallet, and unit load handing equipment interact; educating them on systems-based design and how to look at the interactions instead of just the components; and providing them with tools that could model these interactions (namely, the Best Load and Best Pallet software).

Participants worked to perform an audit of an example warehouse and then analyzed their findings by inputting them into the Best Load software. Participants then were able to re-design individual components within the system in order to increase the effectiveness and reduce the cost of the overall system.

Learn more about short courses being offered by CPULD by visiting: https://www.unitload.vt.edu/education/continuing-education.html