Crossdocking: The best material handling is no material handling

By John M. Hill, principal, ESYNC -- Modern Materials Handling, 6/27/2006

There’s a saying: The best material handling is no material handling. Few practices address this concept more dramatically than crossdocking, which eliminates intermediate storage and reduces cycle times.

While crossdocking scenarios come in many flavors, each requires an infrastructure that supports the continuous flow of materials from source to point of consumption.In the retail sector, products may be packaged and labeled with specific retail store identifiers or addresses by a supplier before shipment to the retailer’s distribution center.

Upon receipt, the retailer manually or automatically identifies each item, then segregates and stages them for store delivery.Better yet, suppliers batch ship products to the retailer’s DC and the retailer’s system sorts the inventory in the appropriate quantities required for store replenishment.

The most important condition to facilitate crossdocking is real-time visibility of demand and inventory status throughout the network.Other conditions include:

• Automated or conventional materials handling systems designed and configured to minimize travel times between receiving and shipping.
• EDI or Web-based order processing systems that drop orders to appropriate locations based on the ship-to address and visibility of inventory availability by shipping point.
• Warehouse management systems that have advance notice of inbound material schedules, the ability to allocate to specific order and manage the flow of these materials to consolidation points in shipping, and outbound carrier scheduling capability.
• Bar code, RFID and/or voice-data entry subsystems that provide for accurate, real-time identification of both inbound and outbound materials.