Atish Jadhav

Even if Cross-Docking was used popularly in the trucking industry in 20s and later in military operations, Wal-Mart started using it in 80s and made it popular in retailing. Cross-dock is essentially a process in a warehouse/ facility. In this process, movement of products/ goods from receiving door to shipping door happens without/ minimal handling of materials and with no storage. Among many of the other reasons - saving cost in storage and delivery, faster time to market, reduced space requirement, time effectiveness in fulfilling JIT manufacturing, and improved economies of scale for retailers and transportation, are the main reasons because of which organizations are inclined to extend their supply chain capabilities to adopt this process. However, retail organizations may have to consider many of the other aspects before adopting cross docking. Let us consider few of the important factors which may individually or in combination with other factors influence the decision ...

Irrespective of the transportation management (who’s who?), cost of transportation is always paid by the Lead Organization to the carrier. Organization may follow, 1PL and 2PL logistics (Transportation ONLY-insource and outsource). It is said that - Inbound and Outbound load management including transportation is one half or two third of price of the product. So majorly improving SCM, ends up in shortening cost incurred for transportation. Controlling entire inbound freight management may not be effective for all retail organizations. This may vary from organizations inbound volume and value of the load carried each time they receive an inbound freight. Its like a bell curve. I think, for an organization managing in house transportation, cost of the freight is directly proportional to the volume of the freight up to a certain 'breakeven point'. Beyond this point, cost decreases if volume goes on increasing. Hence till this point its better to compensate this cost by negotiat...