This is another simple example. A customer that is very new to road transport needs to move 40 pallets from one location to another in a trailer truck. He calls up a transportation company and it quotes him a price for the full trip and offers different container sizes. All else equal, the bigger the size, the higher the cost. The transportation company justifies this by indicating that longer trailers are harder to drive around.

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We will use Quick Pallet Maker to choose the best container size and reduce the transportation costs as much as possible. The first step is to run QPM and open a new Container Fill window from the File menu.

The next step is to introduce the pallet dimensions. IN this case, the pallet measures 1200x1000x1100 mm and weighs 500 kg. We have 40 pallets to ship.

Leaving the default container dimensions and the selection of the 20' container, we select Recalculate from the Tools menu.

This will calculate how many 20' containers we would need to ship the 40 pallets. If we click on the right arrow at the top-right section of the window, we will see the second container that is also full of pallets.

Note that when the second container (number 2) is shown, the right arrow is gone and a left arrow appears. Clicking on it would reveal the first container.

Since we would need to pay for two trips to ship the 40 pallets in 20' containers, we will want to check how these pallets fit in the larger containers. For this, we click on the Input tab or use the Change Data command from the Tools menu to see the Input Data tab. Once there, we select the 40' container and Recalculate again.

This time, the full load fits in only one 40' container. This is essentially the best solution for the customer as only one trip is made and the cost for the 40' container is less than for the longer containers.

However, just for reference, we can go back and select the 45' container to see that in effect, space is wasted unnecessarily.

Same for the 48' container (note the lower volume efficiency).

Even worse for the 53' container. Hence, the customer asks for the shipment to be made in a 40' container.

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