Cross-docking
Cross-docking is a transfer in which goods never reach a rack: they arrive, are split by consignee and move on the same day. The warehouse works as a sorting point rather than a place to store stock.
Two variants show up. In the first, the supplier ships goods already split by consignee and the warehouse moves pallets from one truck to another. In the second, a consolidated load arrives and has to be broken down on site against orders, which needs a staging area and people to sort it.
Cross-docking rests on information that arrives ahead of the goods. The warehouse has to know before unloading what is on the truck and who it is for, so the supplier sends an electronic dispatch advice (the DESADV message, also called an ASN) and pallets carry GS1 labels that a scanner reads. Without that, the transfer turns into counting cartons in the yard.
The trap sits in the timetable. The whole wave depends on aligned windows, so one late truck blocks several departures, and goods with nowhere to go end up on a rack anyway. That is why cross-docking works where deliveries are repeatable and pre-booked, most often in FMCG distribution and in short-shelf-life fresh goods.
You can tell this is your topic when part of your volume is received and shipped within a day yet still goes through the full warehouse path, put away to a location and picked again later. The question is then whether the WMS can flag that stream and route it separately.