subject: What Is Cross Docking? [print this page] Unless you have personal work experience in the courier industry, there is a good chance that you're going to be unfamiliar with industry specific terms like "cross docking". However, when you're looking at the website of the courier in Phoenix that you're using to ship your goods for you, there is a good chance that you might see somewhere in their material that they use cross docking services in order to help get client's deliveries made faster and to reduce the expenses that clients are going to face when shipping with them. Cross docking is a very effective method for shipping, but in order for you know why it is a good thing if your courier follows this practice, it helps a lot to know exactly what it is first.
Cross docking is a method of shipping that reduces the number of times that cargo is loaded and unloaded from trucks, and reduces storage time and time when the package isn't moving. Instead of a truck driving to a terminal, unloading its packages, and then having to wait for several different trucks to come and make their pickups to make sure the packages continue towards their destinations, cross docking instead uses a system where the goods are transferred directly from one truck to another. By simply having several trucks meet at a terminal at a predetermined time and moving the goods straight from truck to truck, it can greatly reduce the amount of time it takes for a package to be delivered. The reduction in need for storage space also greatly reduces the costs faced by the courier company, which also means lower costs for you.
Cross docking has widely been recognized by those in the shipping and logistics industries as the most efficient way to distribute goods across a large area. This was a technique that first started getting used in the American trucking industry many years ago, but as time went on, others have realized how efficient a method of shipping it is. The military adopted cross docking as their primary method of operating supply lines, reducing the amount of time and space needed for storing goods at various staging points. Another very important example is the retail superstore giant Wal-Mart, who has for decades now been using cross docking as just one of the important techniques that they use to keep costs down, therefore allowing them to offer such low price goods to their customers.
