Bridgewater Logistics’ state-of-the-art crossdocking operations support growing trends in supply-chain management, including just-in-time deliveries, as well as increased collaboration among participants and the rapid deployment of new and sophisticated technologies in supply chains.
“Our crossdocking operations reduce, or completely eliminate the time and costs of holding and handling inventory. This includes routing material and product to storage areas, the subsequent retrieval of the items from racks and rerouting them back to the docking area. Importantly, Bridgewater Logistics’ ability to significantly expedite orders enables our clients to provide an unrivalled quality customer service,” Quinton de Villiers, managing director of this leading South African transport logistics company, says.
At Bridgewater Logistics’ sophisticated crossdocking operations, goods and materials cross directly from the receiving to the shipping docks directly from the inbound to the outbound trucks.
The company’s most sought-after crossdocking solution is a cost-effective full pallet load operation. Bridgewater Logistics marks the incoming load and separates it by outgoing orders, before sorting the pallet loads and rerouting them onto outgoing trucks for direct transportation to their various end destinations.
However, the company is also able to supply a significantly more sophisticated and specialised service.
A case in point is case-load order makeup. Here, Bridgewater Logistics separates merchandise that has already been sorted and marked by stock-keeping units by customer order. Pallet loads are then broken up to separate goods according to customer order, before re-palletising and transferring the cases to the appropriate outbound trucks for delivery to their various end destinations.
Bridgewater Logistics even has the capacity to provide hybrid and opportunistic crossdocking solutions.
In terms of a hybrid crossdocking model, materials in storage at the warehouse are blended with incoming materials to create new palletised orders that are routed to outbound trucks, while some of the arrivals are routed to one of the company’s warehouses for temporary storage.
An opportunistic model entails crossdocking late-arriving products on back order at the company’s facility or combining them with items in storage, as opposed to placing them in inventory and order-picking them.
Bridgewater Logistics is also able to temporarily store promotional or seasonal merchandise on behalf of its clients until they are required by the end customer. This novel solution has been designed to save clients in storage space, as well as the onerous and time-consuming handling of goods and materials.
“These models provide sound examples of the many ways in which Bridgewater Logistics is able to enhance customer service by accelerating delivery times. Customers receive what they want and when they want it which is, essentially, the ultimate goal of any optimised supply chain,” De Villiers concludes.
