Three ways freight moves through a warehouse.

Cross-docking keeps freight moving through the building

In a cross-dock, freight arrives on one truck, gets sorted at the dock and leaves on another, usually within the same day. It never goes into racking, so the bill has no storage line. The work is receiving, sorting, staging and loading. Rolls Right runs cross-docking in Calgary across six dock doors.

It suits freight that already knows where it is going.

• Store and distribution-centre orders that ship as soon as they land
• Several suppliers' freight consolidated onto one outbound load
• One inbound load split across several destinations

Transloading changes the vehicle

Transloading moves freight from one mode or container to another. The usual case is an ocean container unloaded at a dock and its cartons or pallets loaded onto a domestic trailer, often after being built onto pallets. A transload can happen the same day, or the freight can wait in storage in between. How a rail container reaches a Calgary warehouse walks through the steps from the ramp.

How the freight crosses the dock decides the labour.

• Direct: pallets move straight from one trailer to the next, the least handling of the three, with both sides scheduled for the same day
• Floor-loaded to palletised: loose cartons come off by hand and get built onto pallets for the next leg
• Floor-loaded to floor-loaded: loose cartons in and loose cartons out, which takes the most labour per container

Storage holds stock between orders

Storage is for product that waits: imports, seasonal stock, safety stock, or anything that ships in smaller orders over weeks or months. The warehouse receives it, puts it away into a pallet position, counts it, and picks or loads it out when an order comes in. In Calgary that is Rolls Right's 3PL warehousing on dry ambient racking.

Slow stock deserves a look at the long-term storage fees some warehouses add once inventory passes an age threshold.

Each one is priced by the work it involves

The charges follow the work, which is why the same freight can cost very different amounts depending on which job it is.

• Cross-docking: handling per pallet, per container or per load, often bundled with the freight on either side, and no storage charge
• Transloading: the unload, priced by container size and whether it is palletised or floor-loaded, plus any pallet building and the outbound loading
• Storage: a monthly charge per pallet position, plus handling once on the way in and once on the way out

Two things change a cross-dock or transload quote after the fact: freight that waits longer than planned, which starts a storage charge, and extra touches such as re-palletising or relabelling. Ask how both are priced before the first load.

Choosing the right one in Calgary

Start with where the freight is going and when. If it is sold and booked, cross-dock it. If it has to move from a container to a trailer, it is a transload, and the packing (palletised or floor-loaded) sets most of the cost. If it ships over weeks, store it, and read the handling rates alongside the storage rate.

Rolls Right's Calgary building handles all three across six dock doors, with its own trailers based at the building and its own line haul to Vancouver six days a week. Cross-docking and transloading are quoted differently, so tell us which pattern your freight follows.