A TUTORIAL ON CROSSDOCKING

Abstract

In crossdocking, the inbound materials coming in trucks to the crossdock facility are directed to outbound doors and are directly loaded into trucks that will perform shipment, or are staged for a very brief time period before loading. Crossdocking has a great potential to bring savings in logistics: For example, most of the logistics success of Wal-Mart, the world’s leading retailer, is attributed to crossdocking.In this paper,the types of crossdocking are identified, the situations and industries where crossdocking is applicable are explained, prerequisites, advantages and drawbacks are listed, and implementation issues are discussed. Finally a case study that describes the crossdocking applications of a 3rd party logistics firm is presented.