Pallet Build & Stacking Planner: Stack It Right the First Time

The problem this kills

A mixed pallet is a physics problem solved by whoever happens to be on the dock. They eyeball a cart of cartons, guess what goes on the bottom, and start stacking. Sometimes it works. Sometimes the 60-pound box of fittings ends up on top of a carton of glassware. Sometimes the stack is built two boxes too tall and won't clear the trailer door, or it hangs over the pallet edge and gets shredded by a forklift two stops later. Sometimes a "THIS WAY UP" carton goes in sideways and a customer opens a box of broken product.

Every one of those is a claim, a re-pick, or an injury — and the knowledge of how to build the pallet right lives in one or two experienced people's heads. When they're off, quality drops. You don't need to memorize stacking rules or buy heavy load-planning software to fix this, and you don't need to be a developer.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool. You start a pallet build, load the cartons going on it (from a CSV, a sheet, or by scanning/keying them in), and enter the pallet specs — footprint, max stack height, and max weight. The tool sorts the cartons into a safe stack order: heaviest and sturdiest on the bottom, lighter and crushable on top, with fragile, THIS WAY UP, max-stack, and do-not-stack-on rules honored. It runs the totals and flags problems before they reach the dock — over the weight limit, over the height limit, footprint overhang, or a fragile carton that would get crushed. Your shipping lead opens the proposed build, adjusts anything, and clicks Approve. Only then does the tool generate a printable pallet-build sheet (the layer-by-layer instructions a picker follows) and a CSV manifest of what's on the pallet.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how you palletize today and who does it, where your carton data lives and exactly what the columns are named, the pallet types and limits you ship on, how you encode fragility and orientation rules, your typical and peak pallet volumes, and your messy edge cases — and then it tailors the data model, the stacking rules, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through loading cartons, the stack-ordering logic, the overweight/over-height/overhang checks, the shipping-lead review-and-approve screen, and the build-sheet and manifest output — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build the whole thing today even with no API to your WMS.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This is real dock tooling, so it ships with the controls a warehouse needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's builds, a complete audit trail of who loaded, edited, and approved which pallet and when, a hard human-approval gate so no build sheet or label prints until a shipping lead signs off, and duplicate guards keyed on the pallet build ID so the same pallet can't be planned or printed twice. Overweight, over-height, and overhang conditions block approval instead of quietly shipping a load that topples.

Who it's for

Outbound and loading associates, shipping leads, and putaway teams who build mixed pallets by hand and want the stacking know-how out of one person's head and into a tool everyone can use. If you can describe how your best loader decides what goes on the bottom, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll see your first safe build sequence take shape the same afternoon.