EDI Cross-Dock Delivery Description
EDI Cross-Dock Delivery is an initiative to push the processing of goods from the retailer back to the vendor. The EDI Cross-Dock Delivery approach is to have vendor’s pre-package goods so the merchandise does not require further processing by the retailer’s warehouse. If done properly, the vendor will pre-package the merchandise in a ‘floor-ready’ state for each store. Each package will be marked for each store (usually using a UCC128 Carton Marking that contains a scanable barcode for the box and a human-readable destination address. The warehouse checks the packing slip to ensure that the number of packages matches the packages received and moves the boxed merchandise from the receiving dock to the shipping dock (hence the name cross dock). To accomplish this distribution system, the vendor must pre-price merchandise, pre-package it by store and the advanced ship notice is sent to the warehouse. Advanced Shipment notification will:
- Reduce warehousing effort, as the warehouse clerk will not have to rip open boxes, price the merchandise and re-package the merchandise by store. It is estimated that the cost savings can be up to 30 cents per unit by the implementation of full vendor floor-ready merchandising using cross-dock distribution.
- Reduce processing time from 3 days per order to an average of 1/2 day per order. There must be a method to mark the merchandise boxes so that the warehouse clerk can move goods from the receiving dock to the ship dock. Improved notification of merchandise arrival to the inventory system. If the retailer’s inventory system has an “in-transit” feature, advanced shipment notification can be used to update the “in-transit” bucket for the merchandise. This is very important when the source of the merchandise is far away from a retailer (e.g. a West Coast retailer whose vendor warehouses have been consolidated into fewer and fewer warehouses, primarily located in the East, thereby increasing the transit time for merchandise arrivals).