If you work in a PepsiAmericas' warehouse, the bulk of what you do each day is directly linked to the loading and unloading of trucks. After 20 years here I can tell you there's a real science to it.
It's like building an enormous puzzle.
All the members of the route loading crew clock in at 6 p.m. and the first thing we do is pick up our "load" tickets from sales. Two loaders are assigned to each trailer, and those tickets tell us what products each account ordered so we can get them on a pallet and loaded onto the truck.
With my tickets in hand, I head over to the "picking" area where I begin building pallets. Some may take a half hour to build - if they include a lot of different SKUs - and some may take as little as five. But if a store needs 20 cases of 24-pack cans, a couple of cases of two-liter bottles and several cases of tea, it's not only my job to build the pallet according to the order but, just as importantly, to construct it in such a way that it doesn't tip over.
Speed and accuracy are crucial.
Once I have the entire order on the pallet, I wrap the whole thing in cellophane, grab a forklift or a pallet jack and carry it to the truck I'll be loading.
At that point, a "checker" will come over to make sure I included everything that was ordered. If anything was missed, I need to go back and correct the mistake before it's placed on the truck. But if the pallet checks out okay, I'll use a forklift to place it in the proper bay on the truck.
With 14 people building pallets, driving forklifts and loading trucks, it can look pretty chaotic in here at times.
That said, if one team is falling behind the others, it's up to everyone working on the crew to pitch in and get the last truck filled. Only after the entire crew has finished filling all its orders, and our loading area is completely clean, do we call it a day.
So it takes a real team effort.
The loaders who fill our express trucks handle things a little differently. While we work at night, the express crews have the run of the place during the day. Because they are dealing with larger stores, the builds can also get very complicated. There may be 100 cases on an express pallet and 85 of them might be different flavors. Those can be very difficult to build and handle.
But the people on both shifts take a lot of pride in doing the job right ... and it shows. If you try to cut corners, it slows everyone else down.
In the warehouse, you've got to do the job right the first time.
