Site planning before delivery
Before the truck is packed and sent out by your manufacturer, discuss with your plant contact how best to stack and ship your project. Are you installing just wall panels, and they are all small in size? If so, the process should be fairly straightforward. But if you have floor, wall and ceiling panels, carefully think through where you're going to store them. In the latter situation, to limit storage problems you may want your project shipped in two different loads, with the roof panels coming in the second shipment. This might happen anyway, since using SIPs for more parts of the building will dramatically increase the size of your shipment.
A fundamental concern is road access to your site. While this isn't a problem in typical urban and suburban situations, some rural and hill-country sites with narrow roads or tight turns may limit access by large semi-trailers. In those cases, panels can be shipped on long flatbeds or flatbed/trailer combinations. One company says their flatbeds range from 18 to 27 feet in length, while their semi-trailers range from 40 to 57 feet.
In the worst case-steep dirt roads in mud or snow conditions-you may find you need to offload panels in a nearby staging area and shuttle them to your site in a pickup; do anything to avoid this situation, as it will significantly increase your time spent handling panels as well as the changes of damaging them during handling.
Since panels take up a lot of space, plan in advance where you want them stacked. You can usually store either most or all of your first-floor wall panels on the floor deck. If you have 2nd story walls, will you need a fork lift or crane to lift them to the second story deck? If you have both 2nd-story wall panels plus ceiling panels, don't place the ceiling panels closer than the walls. In fact, since your ceiling panels will go up last and normally with a crane, you have some options as to how far away you can store them.