Pallet Builder — the whole shipment, not one box
The Pattern Planner answers one box size perfectly. This one takes every box you’re shipping and builds the pallet: heavy and large on the bottom, lighter going up, the odds and ends capped on top. It tells you what goes on each level, how tall the finished pallet stands, what it weighs, and whether you need a second one.
What are you shipping?
One row per case pack — the box it actually ships in, not the loose piece. Untick Stack for anything nothing may sit on top of.
| Item | Length (in) | Width (in) | Height (in) | Weight (lb) | Qty | Stack | Remove |
|---|
The pallet
Common height caps: 48″ if it has to double-stack in the trailer, 60″ or 72″ if it doesn’t. 2,200 lb is the usual working limit for a GMA pallet — set it to whatever your dock, rack or carrier allows.
The build
Why it builds in levels
Packing one box size onto a pallet is arithmetic. Packing six is a problem mathematicians call bin packing, and there is no method that finds the perfect answer — every tool that does this, at any price, runs on rules of thumb. So the goal here isn’t the theoretically perfect pallet. It’s a plan a person can actually build.
That’s why it works in flat levels, the way you’d build it by hand, instead of scattering boxes in three dimensions. Free-form packers will happily hang a case over a gap or ask you to slide one in sideways under a stack that’s already there. A level you can lay down, walk around, and lay the next one on top of is the only kind worth printing.
A level is only as useful as its flattest top. Put a 10″ case beside a 6″ one and you’ve wasted four inches on every level above it.
What decides the order
Each level is built from the densest item still waiting — weight against the space it takes up — and any gaps left in it are filled with your other boxes of about the same height. Anything you mark do not stack is held back and placed last, and nothing is put above it.
Then the levels are settled widest-first. That step matters more than it sounds: building bottom-up leaves a part-empty level wherever a box runs out, and a full level laid on a part-empty one has boxes bridging open air. Settling puts the complete layers underneath and lets the coverage narrow as you go up, so every box has something solid beneath it and the odd ones finish on top. Heavier levels settle lower for the same reason.
The top level is the exception to the height rule. Nothing rests on it, so an uneven surface up there costs nothing — and refusing to mix would cost a whole extra level. So once the complete layers are down, whatever is left over shares the top, whatever height it happens to be. A single tall carton rides beside the short ones instead of claiming ten inches of pallet for itself.
If a level still ends up meaningfully heavier than the one holding it up, or a box ends up with little underneath it, the builder says so rather than quietly hoping.
Same box, same answer as the Pattern Planner
When a level is built from a single item, it uses the exact grid math the Ti-Hi Pattern Planner uses — so the two tools never disagree about how many of one box fit on a layer. The leftover deck space gets filled with your other boxes, never with more of the same one turned sideways. That keeps the counts you can check by hand checkable.
What it can’t do
It only understands rectangles — drums, tires, rolls and odd shapes are outside it. It won’t beat an experienced loader on a strange load, and the crush check is judgement, not a compression test. Treat the output as a good starting plan that saves you the arithmetic, not as a certificate.