An event delivery truck leaves the yard with three jobs on it and comes back with the pickups from two more. Somewhere in the middle of the day it is heaviest, and the question of whether it was over its payload at that moment is one most operators answer by feel. The second question, in what order to load so the first stop's gear is not under the third stop's chairs, is answered by the crew with a lot of digging. Both have better answers, and they start from the same two facts.
Fact one: what each product weighs
Weigh a pack of each product once. A stack of ten folding chairs, a 60-inch round, a crate of glassware, a tent top in its bag. Enter the pack weight, the pack volume and how many units are in a pack. It is a morning's work with a pallet scale and it is the foundation of every load plan after it. Do not estimate. A plan built on guessed weights looks exact and is not, and a product with no weight entered should show on the plan as "not weighed", never as zero.
Fact two: what each truck carries
Each truck gets its payload, the weight it can legally carry, from the plate, not the GVWR; and its cargo space, as a volume or as a deck length, width and height. A trailer is its own vehicle with its own payload, towed by a truck, and the two add. Use a usable percentage below 100, because nobody packs a box truck to the ceiling.
The running load
With those two facts, the day's plan is arithmetic. Deliveries go on at the yard; pickups come on at their stops. Walk the route in order and the weight on the truck changes at every stop. The peak is wherever the sum is highest, often not at the yard but at the third pickup. If the peak exceeds the payload, the day does not fit on one trip, and the plan should split it: a return to the yard between stops, or a second truck, chosen greedily by what fits.
Volume works the same way, and it is usually volume, not weight, that fills a box truck on an event day. Chairs are light and bulky.
Loading order
Load in reverse stop order: the last delivery's gear goes in first, against the bulkhead; the first delivery's gear goes in last, by the door. Within a stop, tents go nearest the door, because at the site the tent goes up before the tables come off. The pull sheet should print in this order, with the truck named, so the crew loads from the list rather than from memory. As each unit is scanned on, it records which truck it is on, so a chair that was supposed to be on Truck 2 and got scanned onto Truck 1 says so before the trucks leave.
What the plan is not
It is not a routing engine. Where the truck goes and in what order is the route plan's job, and for a vacuum truck that is a different problem again; see route planning around the tank. The load plan takes the route's stop order as given and answers two questions only: does it fit, and how does it go on. Keep the two tools separate and each stays simple.
Where it starts
Everything here reads from the pull sheet, which reads from the booking. A kit that expands to its parts, a counted product with a quantity, a tent that resolves to its sections: that is what the warehouse post covers, and it comes first.
