Best Practices: Shipping by design
Whether you're shipping pallets, cartons or pieces, follow these best ways to get your product onto the truck.
By Bob Trebilcock, Editor at Large -- Modern Materials Handling, 11/11/2008
When it comes to order accuracy, consultants say the shipping dock is the last place to get the order right.
The dock is also the last opportunity to optimize your operations. How you get your product from picking and onto a trailer depends on what type of product you’re shipping, and how many dock doors are in your facility, says Bryan Jensen, vice president of St. Onge. “We look at it as a continuum, from pallets to cartons to pieces,” says Jensen.
Shipping pallets: The simplest shipping operations involve product shipped in full pallet quantities. “You’re primarily dealing with consumer packaged goods,” says Jensen. “When you order diapers, you tend to order a pallet load.” In that environment, having a sufficient number of docks doors determines the shipping strategy. “If you have an ample number of dock doors, you can stage trailers at the doors and have your pickers deliver pallets directly from storage into the truck,” Jensen says.
The best facilities scan bar codes at each step of the process, beginning with picking the pallet from a storage location and ending with the scan of a bar code inside a trailer or just adjacent to the dock door. That ensures that the right pallet is loaded onto the right truck. “Unfortunately,” Jensen adds, “you need a lot of dock doors to do that.” In facilities with fewer dock doors, the best practice is to create staging areas, identified by bar codes, in the shipping area. Pallets are then loaded from the staging area onto trailers following the same process as before.
Shipping cartons: Carton shipments, floor loaded onto a trailer, are the gold standard in the retail industry, especially in high volume distribution centers with a high-speed shipping sorter. “If you’re using sortation, the sorter is tracking what cartons go through the system, the sequence they go through the sorter, and which line they are sorted to, even without scanning at the trailer,” says Jensen. “That allows you to run a conveyor right into the trailer to optimize loading.” If there are too many cartons to fit onto the trailer, the operator can simply scan and stage them for the next trailer. Once a trailer is shut, the best companies send the information from the sorter to the store so they can make plans based on what’s coming to their dock.
Shipping pieces: Companies shipping directly to consumers or small orders to other businesses are often shipping parcel packages. “The best companies have a robust in-line manifest system that allows them to capture the weight of the package or carton, print the shipping labels and make last minute decisions about how to ship the parcel to take advantage of rates,” says Jensen. The key, Jensen adds, is to have enough volume that your carriers will drop trailers at your facility. “If you have the volume, you can load the trailers by zone, so that all the parcels on a trailer are headed to the West Coast or the Northeast,” says Jensen. “That saves the carrier a sort on their end that can result in better shipping rates.”
Regardless of how you ship, accurate tracking throughout the process leads to the most efficient operations. “The more tracking you have on a pallet, carton or parcel, the more precise you can be across the board,” Jensen says.
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