Truth be told, I’m not a good chef-especially when it comes to multiple course meals. Not only do I lack the dexterity needed to accurately julienne cut carrots, but often the biggest hurdle is time management. Making sure prepping one part doesn’t bottleneck other cooking processes has delayed many a meal and turned what could be great culinary experiences into sub-optimal dining. That’s why I know the importance of time management and its applications to logistics. One logistics area that reminds me of this the most is dock scheduling.
Much like in my cooking example, if I spend too much time loading or unloading one delivery, it clogs the dock area and delays the day’s schedule-potentially resulting in fines and missed deliveries.
With all the automation, software updates, and newly discovered best practices for operations, we have to ask the question: is dock scheduling dead?
In a sense, perhaps, but let me explain. There’s the old school method of creating a schedule for loading docks on a whiteboard or shared excel file. That method is dying a slow death. It’s an isolated system that requires effort from multiple parties to record information, and it’s prone to mistakes from the manual user input-which can result in further inefficiency and costs.
So, this type of dock scheduling is dead in the world of modern warehousing. However, the concept of carriers delivering goods to a warehouse’s loading dock lives on. Like in the modern advances of cooking, we no longer need to burn food over a fire but can bake and broil as well. And similarly to logistics management, a new and improved type of dock scheduling has taken hold in modern warehouse enterprises. A dock scheduling system that’s web-browser-based, flexible, and efficient in a way that surpasses all antiquated systems that have come before.
To make sure your dock scheduling process lives up to the best version possible, several criteria need to be fulfilled.
A modern dock scheduling tool should do the following:
While other bells and whistles can be added to a general dock scheduling system, the ones listed above rank among the most important to consider. A good dock scheduling tool, like SmartDock, can make sure each delivery isn’t delayed, detained, or derailing worker operations. And like every chef who has to manage their own meal planning, a warehouse manager is every bit as responsible for their customers’ “optimal dining experience.”
If you’d like to learn more about the cloud-based dock scheduling described above, you can find more information at Book Appointments with SmartDock.