Understanding Dock Scheduling

This whitepaper’s objective is to help industry professionals understand the basics of dock scheduling, supported by real industry case studies.

If you haven’t heard much about dock scheduling systems, it may be that, compared to warehouse and transportation management systems (WMS & TMS), dock scheduling is the poor cousin in the family of Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems.

Nonetheless, it is still an essential part of your business, and if not properly addressed, can be very costly to your operation. We’ll address the issues, present numerous examples taken from various industries and provide a roadmap towards a solution.

How to determine whether you need dock scheduling
Independent of the type of business you operate, dock scheduling relates to managing the timeliness of the shipments for both inbound and outbound traffic1 in your facility.

Intuitively, one would think that scheduling is required only when the traffic exceeds the capacity to receive or ship. Although volume is important, it isn’t the only determining factor. In fact, dock scheduling is all about maximizing the efficiency of your dock operations, from the standpoint of your labor, equipment and business requirements.