Many of you have probably heard about cross dock and cross docking but are yet to fully grasp the concept. Well, cross docking is basically a procedure that helps suppliers to directly distribute their wares to their customer with minimum in between shipment or no handling at all.
This system does a great job of material handling and consequently trims down on the need for warehouse storage. Usually, cross docking occurs in a docking terminal and here you will find dock doors and trucks. The dock doors which are both inward bound and outbound enable the truckload to be transferred via the inbound dock and across the outbound dock.
To explain it in much simpler terms, the truck will come into the docking terminal and proceed onto its allocated receiving dock. The truck’s products are unloaded, sorted out and screened in order of destination before being transferred onto another cross dock where they are loaded to an outbound transportation and transported to their destination/customers. As you can see, these cross docking solutions are indeed a valuable alternative to warehousing.