What ten thousand grading photographs taught us about damage

The exercise

We photograph every container at grading and again at dispatch. That is a lot of images, and until last year it was a lot of images nobody had looked at in aggregate. We took the grading set for a twelve-month period — 10,340 containers that failed to reach B grade or better — and classified the primary cause of downgrade or rejection.

Primary cause only. A container can have four things wrong with it; we recorded the one that determined its grade.

The results

Look at the last row. Six-tenths of one percent of containers were retired because the material had genuinely reached the end of its useful life. Everything above it is damage, and roughly 58 % of the total is damage that better handling would have prevented outright.

The forklift number

Thirty-one percent. Nearly a third of every container that fails to make B grade fails because a forklift hit it. That is more than UV and creasing combined and it dwarfs every material-related cause.

The photographs are quite specific about how. The most common pattern by a wide margin is a tine puncture or gouge in the lower third of a long face — the signature of entering from the wrong side, or entering at an angle. Second most common is a corner post bent inward at pallet height, which is a strike while travelling.

• Enter from the pallet entry side. Composite pallets are four-way but the bottle sits closer to the deck on two of the four.
• Full fork depth every time. A half-engaged container pivots and the tine tips reach the bottle.
• Travel with the load low. A filled container has a high centre of gravity and the driver compensates by going faster, which is the wrong compensation.
• Fit corner guards on anything parked in a traffic aisle. They cost about six dollars and they are the cheapest intervention on this list by an order of magnitude.
• Do not lift by the cage top rail. It is not a lifting point.

The UV number, and what it says about storage

Nineteen percent chalked. In a temperate climate that number would be a fraction of this; in Central Texas, containers stored outdoors uncovered are on a three-to-five-year clock regardless of what else happens to them.

The distribution is instructive: chalking is heavily concentrated on the top surface and the south-facing wall, which means a shade structure that covers only the top captures most of the benefit. A tarp is worth several years of container life. So is parking the array against a north wall.

What we did with the finding

Three things. We now send a one-page handling sheet with every order over ten units — the five forklift rules and the shade advice, nothing else. We stock corner guards and we mention them on any order going to a site that has previously sold us impact-damaged containers. And we changed our own yard layout so that the sales row is no longer adjacent to the main traffic aisle, which was, embarrassingly, generating some of the damage ourselves.

Impact damage in our own intake from repeat customers is down about 14 % year on year. That is not a controlled experiment and we would not claim causation, but it is the direction we were aiming at.