Consolidation of cargoes is the stage of their accumulation and sorting at the warehouse of the freight forwarder company and the direct formation of batches of disparate goods that will be shipped on the same vehicle in one direction.
Thus, the speed of shipment, its safety, and cost savings for the client and the carrier also depend on proper and prompt consolidation.
It is the consolidation of goods that allows us to form batches of groupage cargoes and ensures the efficiency of their delivery. At the same time, the more the transport company has its own or rented consolidated warehouses, the more reliable its network, the faster the cargo will become part of a large lot and go to its destination.
A great role is also played by the professionalism of the staff involved in taring, packing and sorting cargo, since each stage of consolidation is important for prompt and careful delivery and inaccuracies in this process are simply unacceptable.
Consolidation scheme: after the cargo arrives at the consolidated warehouse, it is processed and stored until it is combined with other goods. When the cargo is fully formed, it is sent by road to its destination.
CONSOLIDATION INCLUDES
1. The collection of goods from the customer. Such an additional service is in great demand among the clients of transport companies, as it allows not to waste time on independent delivery of cargo to the consolidated warehouse of the company. If the shipper wants to save money and considers it unnecessary to spend money to pay for additional services, he can deliver the goods to the freight forwarder’s warehouse in his city or region. It should be noted that large transport companies open consolidated warehouses in all regional and regional centers, purchasing or renting storage space. Thus, carriers create an extensive network of consolidated warehouses, expanding their field of activity and attracting new customers from various areas and regions of the country.
2. Packing of goods. Usually, customers bring in or pass through the representatives of the transport company the goods in the already packed form. However, ignorance of the rules and requirements for packaging can lead to damage to the goods on the road. In this regard, specialists engaged in consolidation of cargo in the warehouse of an enterprise often offer customers an additional service – additional packaging of cargo, which ensures its reliable and careful delivery.
3. Taring, that is, determining the exact weight of the load. Since the cost of transportation mainly depends on the weight, size of the cargo and the distance of delivery, this stage is important for all participants in the process and allows you to determine exactly how much the customer will pay for the delivery of their property as part of a grouped consignment. Weighing is carried out with the use of special precision equipment, dimensions are also measured – height, width, volume of one package, and then the final calculations are made and an invoice is issued. It should be clarified that both the sender and the recipient can pay for the delivery of assorted cargo.
4. Sorting of groupage cargo. The key moment of consolidation, as sorting allows not only to optimally place all the goods in one vehicle and form lots of homogeneous goods, for example, equipment to equipment, etc., but also to divide the goods depending on the direction of delivery. That is, first of all, employees of the consolidated warehouse select the goods that will be sent, for example, to Arkhangelsk or Krasnodar, and then all the selected batches are sorted by type to ensure the safety of the cargo and prevent mixing of household chemicals with products and so on. The efficiency of the formation of consolidated shipments of goods provide logistics experts who make up and analyze the route. For example, consolidated cargo sent in one direction does not necessarily have to have one final point of delivery. On the way, the car calls in to other consolidated warehouses in settlements located along the route of movement and can deliver cargoes addressed to recipients in these cities. For example, on the way from Moscow to Arkhangelsk, a truck also crosses Sergeyev Posad, Yaroslavl, Vologda and other cities, so that a consignment of groupage cargo may include goods and property sent to these settlements.
EVENTUALLY
Well-established scheme of work and constant monitoring allows us to eliminate the possibility of error when combining the cargo of different senders. Also, our warehouse complexes are located in Germany, Lithuania and Poland, and are used both for the consolidation of small shipments of goods and for the transshipment of complete cargo.