Cross Docking

Cross docking is when you have stock which comes in temporarily, gets sorted in a staging environment, then normally goes out on a different vehicle and usually with lots of other stock that's going to a similar area for delivery.

If your business does cross docking, then you need to be sure your transport management system has the capability to handle cross docking to allow you to sort stock quicker and decrease the likelihood of sending stock out on the wrong vehicle.

In the early days, CartonCloud was designed specifically for a cross dock model. The reason for this was that the business which we were running at the time was a complete cross dock model. It is important to note that lots of other transport systems are solely focused on point to point delivery or courier delivery.

This is very different to the way in which the cross dock model works, which is to pick up in bulk, bring back the stock and split it into areas, then deciding who's going to do which area and allocating the deliveries accordingly, after which the trucks then actually go out and deliver the goods.

The benefit of using CartonCloud if you're doing cross docking is that it's designed specifically for the way you operate. You won't have to do any weird organisational or operational work-arounds in order to make it work. As soon as you've got the software, the cross dock model stuff just works perfectly.

You'll be able to have complete transparency of the consignments coming in, you can even start to allocate the stock before it's there as CartonCloud gives you the flexibility to build a delivery run before the stock has arrived. When the stock does come in it's as simple as checking off the stock on the manifest, being directed to what run to place it on, and boom the driver has all the jobs ready to go.