Role of Cross-Docking in Distribution Systems

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STUDENT SIGNATURE: Yi Wei Lim                            DATE: 11/04/2017

Table of Contents

Role of Cross-docking in distribution systems        4

References        8

Role of Cross-docking in distribution systems

In this competitive era, most of the customers are highly impatient to wait their products to be arrive and they want the products to be arrive in a short time. The supply chain must be reactive and faster with keeping the prices low to meet the satisfaction of customers. Cross-docking is a good system that can implement to a company to meet certain criteria that the customer satisfactions.

Cross-docking make an important role in distribution systems. It is one of the just-in-time strategy for distribution logistics that help a company for cutting their inventory costs while increasing the goods flow, and shortening the shipping cycle and reduce the delivery lead time. Cross-docking can effectively bring substantial reductions in transportation costs without increasing the inventories while together maintaining the satisfaction level of customer services. It can also lead to the reduction of the reorder cycle, thus improving the flexibility and responsiveness of the distribution networks (Apte & Viswanathan 2000). Moreover, cross-docking products are not store as an inventory. As a result, cross-docking is tightly coupled with the corresponding inbound and outbound logistics process.

Every of the company would not want to receive the complaints from the customers regarding the products damage or even make a financial lost on those products. Hence, cross-docking help to minimize the damage of the products. Using cross-docking allow your product to go through a minimal number of locations before arriving at the final locations. All this equates to a smaller chance to make the product damages occurs.

Cross-docking terminals is a distribution center which carrying no or a little of amount stock in the dock terminals in a limited of time. The incoming of the shipments deliver by inbound trucks are unloaded, sorted and the loaded onto the outbound trucks will waiting at the docks, which will transfer the shipments to the specific destinations through the distribution systems. With a compare with warehousing, a cost intensive storage and restoration of goods is eliminated by a synchronization of inbound and outbound flows (Nils & Malte & Armin 2007).

With implementing the cross-docking systems to a company, it improves the efficiency in the distribution center. The reasons that cross-docking is implement are it provides a central site for products to be sorted and the same product are combined to be deliver to a few of destinations in the most productive and faster mode. In addition, it combines a numerous of smaller products loads into one method of transport to save on transportation costs. This process is known as consolidation arrangements. Cross-docking is also break down the large product loads into smaller loads for transportation to create an easier delivery process to the customer and this process is known as deconsolidation arrangements. Besides, cross-docking can be used when the method of transportation needs to change from one to other, for example, from rail to trucks.