CycleCount Kit

The pallet planning tool started as a scratch built visualizer: a quick way to turn pallet and case dimensions into something you can see, not just calculate. Early on it was focused on the fundamentals, fit-to-footprint math, cases per layer, and a clean top-down render that made it easy to sanity check inputs. It was less “optimization engine” and more “make the pallet real,” so I could iterate quickly and communicate what a stack would actually look like.

Where it’s at now is much closer to a usable planning tool. It already supports operational constraints like <b>overhang limits</b> and <b>maximum stack height<b>, and the layout system has evolved from “one best guess” into a set of <b>selectable, feasible patterns</b> for the same dimensions. That shift matters because real pallets are not optimized for one metric. Capacity, stability, case strength, and build practicality all pull in different directions, and the tool now treats layouts as explicit options the user can choose. Along the way, the UI work has been about usability: deduping redundant candidates, naming variants clearly (especially keyed-row patterns like edge vs center), and keeping the dropdown focused on repeatable templates rather than noisy freeform packer results.

Next steps are about expanding the solve without losing clarity. Once the current naming, filtering, and selection workflow is fully dialed in, the plan is to implement partial top layers and support up to three different case sizes in a single solve. That unlocks mixed-SKU and “finish the pallet” scenarios that come up constantly in real operations. From there, the bigger arc is persistence and policy: saving layout rules per SKU, and attaching constraints and preferences to a location profile so “how we build pallets here” becomes part of the system rather than tribal knowledge.

You can find CycleCount Kit here: CycleCount Kit. I’ll do my best to publish build logs here regularly as the project evolves.