LIFO loading: why your last stop should be loaded first

Watch a driver unload at the first stop of a badly planned route and you will see the problem immediately: the freight for stop one is buried behind pallets for stops three and four. Every case has to come off, get restacked on the street, and go back in. Multiply that by every stop and a six-drop route loses an hour or more per day.

The fix is a rule warehouses have known forever: load in reverse stop order. The last delivery goes deepest against the cab; the first delivery sits at the door. That is LIFO — last in, first out — and it sounds trivial until you try to plan it by hand for mixed pallet sizes, stacking limits, and weight distribution at the same time.

The catch is that this is a joint problem. Which items share a truck depends on the route; the route depends on what fits together. Plan them separately and you get either efficient routes with impossible loads, or beautiful loads on wasteful routes. Planning them together is exactly what SKW TransportOS does: what goes on each truck, the stop order, and how to pack every carton, all consistent with each other.

If you want to see it on your own freight, the free calculator checks a single truck in seconds — and a free account plans full multi-truck, multi-stop routes with the packing order spelled out step by step.