Understanding Organizational Characteristics for Cross-Docking Adoption: A Case Study of Thai Industries

The cross-docking technique has attracted businesses as a way to respond to customer orders by increasing goods flow and shortening the shipping cycle. In cross-dock, incoming goods are sorted and directly reloaded to the outgoing trucks without being stored in between. The literatures have reviewed on the suitability of cross-dock and organizational structure, yet only few have identified the common attributes or they only focused on one aspect of organizational characteristics. This paper pertains to the study of organizational characteristics for cross-docking adoption. A total of 300 questionnaires were collected from different firms in central Thailand. Based on the descriptive analysis, the results showed that cross-dock is widely used in different industries such as retailing, food and drug and textiles. The predominant goods that go through cross-dock are not just only finished products but also raw material. Types of industry and inventory were found to have a significant impact on the choices of cross-dock, while size of organization and automation level showed no influence on the selection of distribution operations.