December 2007 - Accelerated Profits from Visibility, Accountability, Predictability for the Supply Chain

Part five of five articles about distribution management optimization.

We complete our look at retail distribution performance, based on findings from the 2006 Retail Supply Chain Best Practices Study by Tompkins and Traendly.

Regarding crossdock and flow through operations, Tompkins and Traendly found that:

• Costs, transit times and damage increase the more times a product is handled in moving from vendors to stores or customers.
• Flow through at distribution centers required 3.0 touches, and
• Cross dock at distribution centers required 2.0 touches, while
• Pick from stock at distribution centers required 5.3 touches.

Based on the above, they determined that the mix of crossdocked, flow-through and stored product can significantly impact average gate-to-gate times through distribution centers:

• Receipt processing and crossdock to shipment staging (for crossdock products) averaged 1.0 hours, and
• Receipt processing and flow through to shipment staging (for flow through products) averaged 1.7 hours, while
• Time in storage (all storage types, including reserve storage and picking locations) averaged 503 hours, plus the
• Pick from stock to completion of packing and move to shipping time of 2.8 hours.

Yet, in spite of the clear advantages offered by flow-through and cross dock processing, Tompkins and Traendly found that while crossdock and flow through are the most significant opportunities to reduce inbound order cost and transit times, they are a relatively small percent of the order flow.

Part 5: Flow though, cross-dock, pick-from-stock, and future best practices:

Warehouse management solutions based on traditional manufacturing distribution may provide adequate support for pick-from-stock practices, but often lack support for flow through and cross-dock practices that offer retailers the most gains in distribution optimization. Many WMS offerings also lack the configurability necessary to adapt to future best practices and distribution technologies.

The link below will lead you to our White Paper Library, where you can download the entire Distribution Management Optimization paper and others.

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