Slip Sheet

Slip Sheets are thin pallet-sized sheets made of steel, plastic or fibreboard, used for truck or containers goods shipping.

Very well spread in the United States, this technique is only starting to be used in Europe, mainly because for the moment (2008) no European standard exists.

Description

1. The slip sheet is placed on the floor. Then the goods (packaging, card box…) are placed on the slip sheets and shrouded or wrapped.

2. The whole load (goods + slip shit) is dragged by an adapted forklift onto its forks. The forklift then loads the goods and slip sheet on the transport mean (truck, container).

3. At offloading point, same process is used

Advantages

• Space savings (a slip sheet represents 1% of a pallet volume)

• Weight savings

• Cheaper than pallet

• 100% reusable

• Cleaner platform

• Ideal for uniform size of goods/boxes

Drawbacks

• Need of investment in expensive push-pull attachments,

• Highly trained forklift drivers

• Difficulties if size of load/boxes is not uniform

• Better to have a high quality in load wrapping

Free-Logistics.com advises the following approach:

• Use slip sheets for large transportations from supplier manufacturing (product low diversity, long transportation…)

• Use pallets for more “downstream” flows (product high diversity, short transport…)

Source photo: https://slipsheet.net/