In today’s world, speed and productivity of an organization’s supply chain plays an important role in its growth. From using state of the art technology such as RFIDs or SAP SCM modules which provide end to end solution to using tried and tested techniques like the Ford Assembly line and the Toyota Production System, organizations these days use all the tricks of the trades to speed up their whole logistics process, right from procuring goods to distributing them. Cross-docking is one of such strategy. It refers to moving products from a supplier or manufacturing plant and delivering it directly to the customer with almost negligible material handling in between or storing in warehouses.
Cross-docking mainly takes place in distributing docking terminals where goods from incoming trucks are unloaded and then loaded directly into outbound trucks with minimum or no storage in between and delivered to variety of destinations. Cross-docking synchronizes inbound product flow of goods with outbound product flow, thus eliminating storage of inventory and essentially transforming warehouses from storage nodes to transfer nodes. Organizations having “hub and spoke arrangement” for their supply chain often use cross-docking to minimize time and cost and to increase their efficiency.