A customer's pallet drawing, read into a quote sheet your estimator can finish.

Requests come in every form: a stamped drawing, a spec sheet with a customer's part number, a photo of a pallet in their yard, a note that says 48 by 40, four-way, heavy. Your estimator works out the footprint and style, the deck and stringer or block sizes, the lumber, the fasteners, whether it can be recycled and whether it is going overseas, then calls about whatever is missing. Only then can anyone price it.

For the test, AI reads copies of those requests and drafts the quote sheet: footprint and style, deck boards, stringers or blocks, lumber grade and species, load fields, new or recycled, and treatment, each with the place it came from, plus the questions a person must settle first. It writes no price. Your reviewer checks each draft against the sheet your team built at the time.

Size arrives in the customer's order, not yours. A Kansas State University bid titled KSU Foundation Seed, published in March 2023, asked for 420 pallets it sized as 40 x 54, width first, with "three runners" where your sheet says stringers. The Uniform Standard for Wood Pallets, in Woodpack Global's 2025 edition, gives pallet size by stringer length, then top deckboard length, then overall height, so that pallet reads 54 x 40 there. It sizes a deckboard by thickness, width and length, and a stringer or block by width, height and length. The bid named nominal 2 x 4 runners and 1 x 6 boards, then actual minimums of 1 3/8 by 3 1/2 by 54 and 3/4 by 5 1/2 by 40 inches. The draft keeps the customer's words beside your order and marks any size where nominal and actual could be confused.

A whole design can sit inside a few sentences. That bid took out the third bottom board from each edge to admit a pallet jack, set the opening at no less than 8 3/8 inches starting 12 1/2 inches from the end, and held boards to gaps of no more than 1 1/2 inches. It wanted at least nine fasteners per board. Across three runners that comes to three per connection, the Uniform Standard's minimum for boards from 5 up to 7 inches wide; below 5 inches the minimum is two, and from 7 to 8 inches it is four. The Standard also separates two-way, partial four-way and full four-way entry, and single-face, double-face nonreversible and double-face reversible styles. It recommends a stringer notch opening 2 inches deep and 9 inches long and rules out square notches. The draft fills those fields only where the request supports them, and asks where it doesn't.

A load number is not a load condition. The bid wanted a pallet "capable of no less than 3600# load" and said nothing about how it would be supported. Part II of the Uniform Standard calls for a description of the unit load, its bearing areas, maximum and average loads, the longest unsupported span along length and width, and how many unit loads stack, and takes the condition with the highest stress as the basis for performance. It separates purpose-built pallets, meant to survive at least one trip without repair, from reusable ones, and it names ASTM D1185, Standard Test Methods for Pallets and Related Structures Employed in Material Handling and Shipping, and the ISO 8611 series for testing. The draft carries each load field the customer gave and turns each blank into a question. It never says a pallet will carry a load, and none of this is engineering advice.

Lumber callouts have a vocabulary. The Uniform Standard lets a buyer specify wood by class number: 1 is high density Eastern hardwoods, 13 is SPF, 21 is Eastern oaks, 22 is SYP. It grades components as Select, Premium, Standard, Utility or Economy by the defects each allows, and it says moisture content is not limited, pointing to ASTM D4442 or D7438 for measuring it. A request that says new hardwood, dry or good quality has told your estimator very little. Nails are their own line: plain shank, helically threaded or annularly threaded, specified by measured characteristics, connection design properties or both. The draft copies what the request says in those terms and, where it says something looser, writes the question instead of choosing a class or a grade.

Recycled, export, and what your reviewer watches. A repaired pallet has damaged parts replaced, a remanufactured one is completely reassembled with new fasteners, and a combo mixes new and recycled parts, typically recycled deckboards on new stringers. Repaired 48 by 40 notched three-stringer pallets fall into Class 1, 2 or 3 depending on the stringer repairs, and species in a remanufactured pallet is not limited, so a quote can't promise one unchecked. A customer who just writes GMA is pointing at a grocery industry recommendation the Standard's annex dates to 1992; one shipping overseas may name EUR, CP1 or ISO 6780. New pallets for export must be ISPM 15 compliant, which the draft records as a treatment field a person confirms. Your reviewer checks size order, components, lumber, load fields, new or recycled, treatment, and whether the draft asked what your estimator had to ask.

If your reviewer says yes, new requests get a draft quote sheet and a question list for about 30 days.

Your estimator checks every sheet, answers the questions, finishes the design and sets the price. Nothing goes to a customer until a person sends it, and your quoting system and ERP are updated the way they are today.

Choosing a next job is your decision, and it carries its own price.