Design of Receiving and Shipping Docks

Your small-item, flatwear, or GOH order-fulfillment operation starts at your receiving docks and ends at your shipping docks. Your receiving and shipping dock areas should be designed to ensure a cost-effective, efficient, smooth, and continuous movement of UOPs through the order-fulfillment operation. A receiving activity ensures the vendor delivery matches your company's purchase order and that there is a UOP moved from the dock area to the storage area. A shipping activity ensures flow of CO ordered, picked, packed, and manifested packages from your process area into a CO delivery vehicle. Cost-effective and efficient receiving and shipping dock activities require a vendor UOP delivery or CO vehicle spotted at the correct dock and at the appropriate time. An additional dock incremental cost is a small investment when compared with the order-fulfillment operational costs that are associated with the increase of an in-house transport concept cost, low employee productivity, poor vendor-delivered piece flow, late customer order (CO) delivery, or inability to unload or load critical vendor delivered pieces (UOP) on-time.

Several parameters and operational factors assure an accurate and on-time UOP and CO delivery truck movement within your truck yard. Elements of a cost-effective and efficient unloading activity of a vendor UOP delivery truck and loading activity of a CO delivery truck are:

• Accurately projecting the number of vendor UOP and CO delivery trucks and associated unloading and loading times

• Good design of the receiving and shipping UOP and CO dock staging areas

• Easy vendor...