Assets That Vanish Every Year Without Appearing on the Books
Pallets, plastic containers, roll cages, and insulated boxes—reusable logistics containers—are collectively known as RTIs (Returnable Transport Items). The problem is that most of them are expensed as consumables and never tracked as individual assets on the balance sheet. A single plastic pallet costs roughly ₩30,000–50,000, and a roll cage can exceed ₩150,000. For a company operating 10,000 units, that means hundreds of millions of won in assets sitting entirely off the books.
At a 15% annual loss rate, a 10,000-unit fleet loses 1,500 units per year—about ₩60 million in replacement purchases. Yet without measured turnaround times and loss rates, there is no evidence to explain *why* the purchase keeps repeating, so it simply repeats. Recovery discussions with partners fail for the same reason: both sides arrive with different handwritten ledgers, and the meeting ends in an argument rather than a reconciliation.
Why RTI Management Is Not Inventory Management
Let Asset Unit Cost Decide the Tracking Method
Item-level tracking gives you full movement history and clear accountability for losses, but it carries tagging and operating costs. In practice, item-level management pays off when unit cost exceeds ₩30,000 and you serve dozens of partners; for low-cost wooden pallets circulating in bulk, per-partner quantity-level management sits on the better side of the break-even line.
Settlement and Contracts Are Half the System
Implementation Sequence and Measuring the Result
Validate results against three metrics: recovery rate, average turnaround days, and total annual cost per unit (purchases + repairs + loss write-offs ÷ fleet size). Cutting turnaround from 25 days to 18 reduces the required fleet by roughly 28%, and that reduction lands directly on the replacement purchasing budget.
Start With POLYGLOTSOFT
Drawing on our WMS and WCS implementation experience, POLYGLOTSOFT designs and builds RTI tracking and settlement automation systems. We phase the rollout to match how your site actually operates—from establishing physical-count baselines to barcode and RFID read design, partner portals, and dwell-day settlement logic. If you want to stop repeating the same replacement purchase every year because containers never come back, we would be glad to talk.