A customer asked recently if we had any photos or video of the floor on a busy day. We do not have great photos to share, mostly because we are bad about taking them. But this is a written walkthrough of a Tuesday in early September.
05:30
Pete unlocks the gate. The first trailer of the day, a recovery load from a co-packer in Sussex, is already at the dock waiting. The driver has been there since 5:15. We start brewing coffee for the dock team.
06:45
The day-shift inspection team rolls in. There are four of us today, which is right for the expected throughput. Marisol takes the first trailer photo set and starts logging the Sussex load.
07:30
The Sussex load is 240 Gaylord boxes, lidded, on plastic 48x40 pallets. About 70% looks like Grade B at a glance, 25% Grade C, 5% in the recycling stream. Marisol calls it. We start palletizing the regrade output to staging Lane 3.
08:15
Tom from dispatch walks over and tells me an outbound to Joliet is short by 18 boxes because we shifted some inventory yesterday afternoon. We pull 18 lidded Grade B from the freshly regraded Sussex stock and add them to the load. The Joliet driver is at the south dock waiting.
09:00
Coffee break. We do not skip these on Tuesdays. Tuesdays get long.
09:30 to 12:00
Three more inbound trailers come in. A small recurring pickup from a 3PL in Glendale (about 40 boxes), a larger load of IBC totes that need wash-station processing, and an unscheduled inbound from a co-packer who wanted to clean their floor before quarter-end.
12:30
Lunch. The IBC wash station has a backlog and Greg is annoyed. We add an extra hour to the wash queue and shift one inspector over to help.
13:30 to 16:30
Two outbounds. A truckload of triple-wall lidded Gaylords to a beverage co-pack in Madison, and a smaller load of reconditioned 275-gallon IBCs to a chemical blender in Waukesha. Both photographed against BOL, both signed clean.
17:00
Dock team starts shutting down. We've received 4 trailers, shipped 3, and inspected about 540 individual Gaylord boxes. Recycle bales were not pulled today; tomorrow morning.
17:30
Pete walks the floor one more time. The Tuesday board has been updated, tomorrow's manifest is staged, the gate is locked at 17:42.
That is a Tuesday. Not interesting if you do this for a living. Interesting if you have never seen what an industrial used-packaging yard actually does day-to-day.