subject: Understanding Cross Docking Services [print this page] Cross docking is a name for a practice that is in use by several of the largest transportation companies in the world in order to minimize the costs of their shipping operation. Cross docking can save your Charlotte courier service money in a number of ways if they utilize it. It can help cut down on the cost of buying and maintaining storage space, it helps reduce the number of hours required to transfer deliveries, and it helps reduce the total time of a delivery. Cross docking is an extremely effective practice which is why over the years it has been adopted so widely by those individuals involved in the transportation industry.
Just how effective cross docking is can be shown by the organizations and companies that have adopted it as their primary method of distribution. Although the method itself began in the trucking industry as early as the thirties, it wasn't until a few decades later when the American military began utilizing cross docking in their logistical operations. In the 1980's, Wal-Mart realized this to be the cost effective shipping methods that they'd been looking for, and using it to improve their distribution network is part of the successful growth of that company.
Cross docking is essentially taking any middle location and delay out of the equation when it comes to the transferring of goods from one truck to another. During any LTL shipment, a given piece of cargo may need to be transported by several different vehicles. Usually, this would result in a drop off at a location like a terminal, and then a pickup at a later date by the next vehicle in that leg of the cargo's journey.
Cross docking doesn't bother with any of that. Instead, it relies on transferring cargo directly from one transportation unit, whatever that may be, directly to the next. Frequently this takes the form of one truck shipping LTL stopping and unloading part of its cargo directly onto another truck which is also shipping LTL.
There are a number of advantages to this method, but it all comes down to speed. Cross docking is a faster way of getting the job of cargo transference completed, which means the deliveries are in the end completed faster. Time is money in the courier industry even more than in any other, which is why cross docking is the preferred method of shipping for all major LTL couriers today.
