What if making shipments through a warehouse could actually be pretty easy?
It can be so if you ship to a cross-docking warehouse. Cross-docking warehouses save you time and money by simplifying and expediting the traditional warehousing process.
Read on for your go-to guide to choosing a cross-docking warehouse in Sacramento.
What Is Cross-Docking?
According to The Balance Small Business, cross-docking “involves delivering products from a manufacturing plant directly to customers with little or no material handling in between.”
It can render storage of items in a warehouse unnecessary.
What Are the Benefits of Cross-Docking?
Where do you even start with cross-docking’s benefits?
First, it saves your business time. More precisely, it eliminates the time spent doing the steps of storing items in a warehouse. These steps include assembling items for delivery, packing them, taking them to a shipping agency, and more.
Second, cross-docking saves your company money in various ways. One way is labor costs. When you don’t have to pay for the cost of loading and unloading materials stored in a warehouse, you save some money.
You also save money by shrinking transportation costs. With cross-docking, you can choose a faster transportation route to reduce the cost of vehicles’ repairs and fuel.
That leads you to the third benefit: customers will also get their products sooner. When they do, chances increase that they become your customer again. Getting rid of the traditional warehouse reduces inventory management risks and quickens the screening process.
The benefits don’t stop there. Cross-docking does away with buffers like warehouse storage. Pharmaceuticals and other refrigerated items can be shipped directly to the customer rather than having to store them in an expensive, refrigerated warehouse.
Cross-Docking and Warehouse Systems
The kind of cross-docking that’s best for your business depends on the kind of products that you ship.
If your items ship with small-package or less-than-truckload carriers, then consider transportation cross-docking.
There’s also opportunistic cross-docking, which moves an item straight from the warehouse’s receiving dock to its outbound shipping dock to fulfill an order. Similarly, retail cross-docking takes different vendors’ products and places them on outbound trucks to be sent to various retail stores.
Then there’s distributor cross-docking, which puts multiple vendors’ inbound products on a mixed product pallet. That pallet is sent to your customer upon receipt of the last item.
Manufacturing cross-docking deals with the receipt of inbound and purchased products for manufacturing. Once the warehouse gets such products, it develops sub-assemblies for the production orders.
What Can Cross-Docking Do for You?
As you can see, any good cross-docking warehouse should provide your business with plenty of benefits, no matter what kind of products you ship. Cross-docking saves your company more time and money than traditional warehousing. The key is to find the right cross-docking warehouse.
For the best cross-docking solutions in Sacramento and the rest of northern California, check out more here.