LPR,Europe’s leading red pallet pooling company, has been providing its Direct Service offering alongside its full-servicepallet system for two successful years. Direct Service sees the pallets move from retailer to customer rather than returningto an LPR inspection depot after each use. With Direct Service, the pallets are returned only when deemed necessary, either by LPR or the next user.
The pallets are sourced and built in exactly the same way for both services but pallets in the Direct Service pool have less LPR intervention, inspection and repair. This results in LPR being able to pass on significant cost savings to their clients.
For LPR, this has opened up new channels – such as the fresh produce sector. A cap on the volumes of pallets being offered as Direct Service ensures that the Direct Service offering has no negative impact on the quality of the remainder of the pool.
LPR currently offer their UK100 (UK standard) pallets as part of this service, and, as with all pallets from LPR, they are young and of high quality.
The Direct Service offering was created when a need was identified for businesses to be able to access pallets of good quality, but that did not need to be sorted and repaired on each cycle. Customers may need to sort pallets themselves or, for example, need to remove packaging left by the previous user.
Simon Wood, Operations Director at LPR says, “We launched this service in response to sector driven, customer demand,for a more cost-effective pallet pooling service. By understanding our customer’s needs, we found that these customers were willing to have more involvement in terms of pallet management and inspection.
“We launched the service in 2016 and it has been a huge success for us. This shows that the demand identified has beenfulfilled and repeat business is secure.”
The Full Service pallet returns to an LPR inspection depot on every cycle. Every pallet is inspected, and repaired where necessary, before being shipped to the next customer. Direct Service pallets do not receive an inspection on every cycle, but will usually receive a depot inspection after approximately three cycles.
LPR owns and pools over 91 million pallets throughout Europe and tracks them via their software programme, MyLPR. This system allows LPR to understand when each was last serviced and repaired.
Further information on LPR is available at www.lpr.eu.
