How Cross-Docking Could Help Streamline Your Business
Most business owners who maintain a warehouse use it to keep a wide variety of inventory on hand until it's ready to ship out to a customer. But depending on how you are paying for your warehouse space, it might not be a great idea to keep certain products on-site for an extended amount of time. Today, more and more companies with warehouses are choosing to implement cross-docking in order to streamline their business operations. Here's what cross-docking is and how it could benefit your company.
What Is Cross-Docking?
Right now, your company likely orders new merchandise or products from vendors, keeps these products on-site in a warehouse when they arrive, and then ships the products back out on an outbound truck when it's time to ship them to a customer or retail store. Cross-docking is a process that essentially eliminates the storage part of this scenario. In other words, you receive the new products or merchandise from your vendor and then immediately move the products from that incoming trailer to an outgoing one that will take the items back out on the road as soon as the unloading and reloading process is complete.
Cross-Docking Could Save You Money
Cross-docking limits the amount of time that merchandise stays in your warehouse and reduces handling time from your logistics partners. If you are currently paying a third party company according to how much warehouse space you are using, cross-docking could help keep these warehouse costs down. Yes, you may have to pay a cross-docking company to help with this process, but you might come out ahead when you compare that contract with how much you are currently paying for your warehouse space.
Cross-Docking Can Help You Sell Products You Are Not Equipped to Store
Do you want to sell items that might require refrigeration or some other type of climate control? Keeping these products on-site in your warehouse might not be feasible if you don't have a way to control the temperature. Building a temperature-controlled storage unit to store these items could be quite expensive. With cross-docking, these items will arrive on an incoming temperature-controlled trailer and then immediately be switched over to an outbound truck that is also temperature controlled. The items won't linger in your non temperature-controlled storage space, so you'll have nothing to worry about as far as maintaining the quality of these items.
Reach out to a warehousing and cross-docking company today for more information.
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