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Have you implemented cross-dock in your facility? | LoadProof

 


This distribution center best practice is called the cross docking. Cross-docking is basically sending a product you are sending from one dock to another dock i.e. from the receiving dock to the outbound shipping dock directly without any intermediary processes. Cross-docking makes it so much efficient because you don’t have to send it to the reserve and then again from reserve to the active location and then pick from the active location.

In the cross-docking process the quantity needed is recognized after the case comes-in. Then recognizing that there is a need for this product with the required number of units, you will be directly sending it to the outbound dock. In the outbound dock a label gets applied and then it goes to the retail store. It’s much more common in the retail world because in the retail world you are shipping it from a DC and they are shipping to all the retail stores that they are serving so it’s okay if they ship one or two units extra. As you get it they are the only one’s shipping the product to their own stores and eventually everything gets sold in the store anyway.

In the retail world the processes that drive are called the distribution.

  1. So you are distributing from store 1, store 2, store 3, store 4 and all the way to store till 100, it’s called distributions. It’s not like a typical order fulfillment model where there is an order coming in with an order header with all the order detail and the processes that needs to go through the allocation process, that mean waving and all that. This is more like a distribution and you’re processing the allocations for these distributions to happen. Then you would pull the product to fulfill like some kind of a put to store process. In a process where you will be putting all the product that’s going into the specific issuance bay cart and moving the cart to the shipping dock. That’s how the retail process works whereas with cross-dock you can skip all these things that happen in between especially like in the following scenario.
  2. When a case is received and it has 10 units and if there is a store that needs the exact quantity immediately it gets cross docked to the store to so it goes to the outbound dock where the label is applied and then it goes to the shipping lane corresponding to store 2 and then it goes directly to the store 2.
  3. We’re just eliminating so many unnecessary touches in the middle so that becomes a much more efficient process and in the end you can set up some flexibility in your cross-dock percentage say like you know even if it’s one or two units more you can still cross-dock it but on a regular order like in a wholesale order or in an E-comm order you cannot do that. These kind of orders not needed to ship for more than what the customer has ordered both in the wholesale world as well as e-comm world.
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