Mixed-SKU export containers planned from a reusable SKU library instead of a fresh spreadsheet per shipment — including the verified customer story behind the four-days-to-minutes result.
Quoting how much cargo fits a 20ft or 40ft container the same day, and running the same packing engine inside the ERP or TMS a forwarding or distribution team already works in.
Right-sizing shipping cartons so parcels aren't billed dimensional weight on empty space, and master cartons fill an inbound container instead of shipping air.
Dense palletized cargo that reaches the container's payload limit long before it runs out of space — planned to weight, balanced end-to-end, and kept road-legal on the truck leg.
Mixed flat-pack and assembled items modelled in 3D before stuffing, so the full 40ft High Cube height gets used and no second container is booked at the last minute.
Incompatible classes kept in separate containers by the packing engine itself and re-enforced on every recalculation, rather than checked against a segregation table by hand.
Out-of-gauge single pieces placed on flatbeds and trailers with per-axle weight, centre of gravity and securing all checked before the cargo is chained down.
Turning the cargo list you already built to plan the container into a Commercial Invoice, Packing List and Proforma — without retyping the shipment or missing a mandatory field.
Pipe, tube, bar and plate: long, dense, and packed by nesting geometry rather than by stacking boxes — the container weighs out with its walls still visible.
Load-planning brief
What ships
Line pipe, tube and conduit in fixed lengths, plus bar, plate, coil and structural sections. Round stock nests, flat stock stacks, and much of it travels on flatbeds and in open-tops as often as in a box.
What binds the plan
Weight, not cube — a 20ft reaches its payload with the container visibly empty. And round cargo does not stack in a grid: how many pipes fit is a hexagonal-lattice question, and telescoping smaller bores inside larger ones changes the answer again.
How ContainerMath handles it
Pipe stow packs round stock on a hexagonal lattice instead of a rectangular grid.
Telescopic nesting places smaller bores inside larger ones wherever the inner diameter allows it.
Volume and weight tracked together, so a weight-limited load is obvious before it is booked.
Flatbed, step-deck, open-top, flat-rack and rail-flatcar presets for cargo that will not go in a box.
Load Securing, Side-Wall Load and timber-dunnage advisories — a loading diagram, not a securing certificate.
A few hundred part numbers in one container: the planning work is the mix and the order it comes off in, not any single carton.
Load-planning brief
What ships
Service and aftermarket parts in cartons, panels and body pressings, batteries and fluids, sub-assemblies on pallets — often several hundred line items against a single purchase order.
What binds the plan
Line count. Nobody keys 300 SKUs into a planner twice, and the plan is only useful if the parts for one PO or one dealer stay in the same box and come off in the right order.
How ContainerMath handles it
Smart Input takes the manifest straight from a CSV or XLSX instead of re-keying it.
The Item and Box libraries hold each part's dimensions and weight once, reused across every shipment.
Consignment grouping keeps a PO, shipment or AWB together in the same container.
Delivery stops load the last drop nearest the door, so a multi-dealer container unloads in route order.
The loading sequence chart hands the floor a step-by-step order rather than a parts list.
Tiles, stone and ceramics — the densest palletized cargo there is, and the quickest way to pay for a container you can only half fill.
Load-planning brief
What ships
Ceramic and porcelain tiles, natural stone, cement and adhesives in bags, sanitaryware, boards and profiles. Nearly all palletized, and much of it unable to take another pallet on top.
What binds the plan
Payload. A pallet of tiles can weigh a tonne, so the container hits its limit at a third of its cube — and the space left over cannot simply be stacked into, because the ware underneath will not carry the load.
How ContainerMath handles it
Pallet mode unitizes the goods and patterns the pallets into the container automatically.
Volume and weight tracked together, showing the payload ceiling arriving well before the volume one.
Per-item Stackable, Fragile and top-load-capacity settings stop the packer crushing the bottom layer.
Centre-of-gravity and per-axle checks keep dense pallets from grouping over a single axle.
Vessel comparison across 20ft, 40ft and trailers, so the weight limit is enforced against the real equipment.
Light cartons that run out of container long before they run out of payload — where a badly sized master carton is paid for on every unit shipped.
Load-planning brief
What ships
Folded garments and footwear in master cartons, fabric rolls and bales, made-ups and home textiles. Light per carton and enormous per order.
What binds the plan
Cube. Payload is never the binding limit here, so every centimetre of headroom left empty is freight paid for air — and the master carton's dimensions decide how much of it there is.
How ContainerMath handles it
Carton Fit computes units per master carton and the space each candidate size leaves unused.
The Optimizer packs the manifest into every candidate vessel and ranks them by cost or by tightest fit.
40ft High Cube presets, so the extra height is priced against the standard box on the numbers.
CBM and volume utilization tracked live against the chosen container.
The Box Library keeps carton sizes consistent across seasons instead of re-measured per order.
High-value, temperature-bound, and part of it regulated as dangerous goods — three constraints landing on one pallet.
Load-planning brief
What ships
Finished dosage and API cartons on pallets, cold-chain product in reefers or air ULDs, devices and consumables, plus the alcohols, aerosols and lithium cells that move as hazardous.
What binds the plan
Fitting is the easy part. A batch has to stay together for traceability, temperature-bound product cannot share a unit with cargo whose range it does not overlap, and hazardous lines cannot share a container with the wrong class.
How ContainerMath handles it
Segregation rules keep incompatible groups in separate containers as the plan is built, not in a review afterwards.
Hazmat Segregation flags class-level IMDG 7.2.4 pairings — planning guidance, not a dangerous-goods compliance determination.
Reefer Compatibility intersects the feasible temperature ranges in a unit and flags controlled-atmosphere clashes.
Reefer presets carry their own reduced interiors and payloads rather than a dry box's figures.
Consignment grouping keeps a batch or lot in one container.
Bagged and boxed commodity in volume: dense enough to weigh out, with a road leg at origin that still has to be legal.
Load-planning brief
What ships
Rice, pulses, sugar, spices and feed in sacks or jumbo bags, boxed fresh produce, oilseed and processed foods — palletized, slip-sheeted or floor-loaded.
What binds the plan
Density and the road leg. Bagged commodity weighs out well before it cubes out, and the same load has to clear an axle limit on the way to the port: legal inside the container is not the same as legal on the truck.
How ContainerMath handles it
Payload-first planning that stops at the weight ceiling rather than at the walls.
Pallet mode plus custom pallet, crate and unit specs matching how the cargo is actually unitized.
Per-axle load checks and a road-legal re-stow that searches for an alignment and weight bias clearing every axle.
Reefer presets and temperature-range checks for the perishable lines.
Export Documents render the Commercial Invoice and Packing List from the same cargo list.
Big light boxes with strict handling rules — cargo where “this way up” and “nothing on top” shape the plan more than the arithmetic does.
Load-planning brief
What ships
White goods, televisions and displays, IT hardware, and the small dense accessory cartons shipping alongside them — awkward aspect ratios sharing a container with ordinary boxes.
What binds the plan
Handling rules rather than cube. A washing machine cannot be laid on its side, a display cannot travel flat, and neither will take a pallet on top — so a packer that ignores orientation and top-load limits produces a plan the floor cannot build.
How ContainerMath handles it
Per-item Upright Only, Stackable, Fragile and top-load-capacity settings the packer actually respects.
Mixed-SKU 3D packing that nests small dense cartons into the space large items leave behind.
40ft High Cube comparison, since bulky light cargo is almost always volume-limited.
The loading sequence chart, so heavy items are placed before the light ones.
Lithium-cell lines can carry a hazard class and be held apart by the same segregation rules.
Resin that weighs out and empty packaging that cubes out — one desk plans both, and the binding limit flips between them.
Load-planning brief
What ships
Resin and masterbatch in 25 kg bags or octabins, film and laminate reels, preforms and closures, and finished empty packaging that is mostly air by design.
What binds the plan
Which limit binds changes per order. A container of resin reaches payload at half its cube; a container of empty bottles reaches its cube at a fraction of its payload. Planning either one from habit gets the other wrong.
How ContainerMath handles it
Volume and weight tracked together, so every plan states which limit it actually hit.
Pallet mode for bagged resin and octabins; Carton Fit for the packaging side of the same catalogue.
The Optimizer ranks candidate vessels by cost or by fit across the whole manifest.
A longitudinal-only setting for reels and rolls, so cylinders are not stood on end.
Saved load plans, so a repeat lane reloads its answer instead of re-deriving it.
A reefer is not a dry box with a plug on it — the machinery takes the length, the insulation takes the width, and the payload differs too.
Load-planning brief
What ships
Chilled and frozen food, dairy, seafood, flowers and pharmaceutical product, palletized into 20ft and 40ft reefers or refrigerated trailers.
What binds the plan
Planning to a dry container's dimensions. A 40ft reefer's interior is roughly half a metre shorter and noticeably narrower than a 40ft standard, so a pallet count derived from the dry figures does not load — and everything sharing the unit has to sit in a temperature range the rest can live with.
How ContainerMath handles it
Reefer container and trailer presets carrying their own reduced interiors and payloads.
Reefer Compatibility intersects the feasible temperature ranges in a unit and flags controlled-atmosphere clashes.
Pallet mode for the standard patterns cold chain actually ships in.
Volume and weight tracked against the reefer's own payload rather than a dry box's.
Planning guidance, not a cold-chain compliance tool — the setpoint stays your call.
Building to a ULD instead of a container: a contoured can, chargeable weight, and much less forgiveness for a wrong assumption.
Load-planning brief
What ships
Parcels and cartons built onto pallets and into lower-deck and main-deck ULDs — express, e-commerce airfreight, pharmaceutical shipments and time-critical spares.
What binds the plan
A ULD is not a rectangle. Plan an LD-3 as a box and the corners the airframe takes back get counted as usable space, so the build sheet promises volume the can does not have — on top of chargeable weight, which prices the air you ship.
How ContainerMath handles it
Five IATA ULD presets across lower-deck and main-deck positions.
Contour-aware volume: the profile cut is modelled as exclusion zones and removed from the utilization figure — deliberately conservative rather than exact.
Carton Fit for the master-carton sizing that drives chargeable weight.
Volume and weight tracked against the ULD's own rated figures.
