Yard Management Systems Archives

Are Your Yards Connected to the Supply Chain Ecosystem?

Uncategorized | By Matt Yearling • 06/15/2017

By definition, an ecosystem is a group of interconnected elements, formed by the interaction of a community of organisms with their environment. The same concept applies in the supply chain, where networks of organizations—including manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, retailers, customers, and carriers—are all involved in the hands-on delivery of a specific product or service.

While few would argue the important role that the manufacturing plant, warehouse, distribution center, and transportation channel play in getting goods from the raw material stage to the end user, at least one link in that chain is consistently ignored or overlooked. That’s because for the most part, yard management methods are still manual data capturing and processing processes. This reality is creating significant challenges in today’s fast-paced, omni-channel distribution environment where smaller and smaller orders are expected to reach their final destinations within ever-shrinking windows of time.

In the article titled Is Your Yard Ready to Join the Digital Revolution?, I stressed some of the key yard management challenges organizations are facing today. Corporations have made significant investments in managing their transportation and warehouse assets using transportation and warehouse applications; they now realize that without real-time, accurate trailer and shipment status information across their facilities, they cannot gain full value for these technology investments. For instance, delays in the yard can mean production down time for manufacturing operations, product spoilage if handling perishable goods, lost opportunities caused by stock-out for retailers, or credibility issues with carriers and customers.

Four Ways to Reverse the Tide

The good news is that these challenges are not insurmountable, nor do they have to plague your operations day in and day out. Here are four ways to gain efficiencies and increase velocity:

Don’t think of the yard as a single facility problem. Sure, the tractor-trailer yard is an entity all its own, but we know that organizational silos are highly ineffective and slowly going the way of the 8-track-tape. Instead of viewing the yard as that “black hole” that exists between the warehouse and the transportation chain, look at it as a highly interconnected, vital part of the overall supply chain where inventory travels from point-to-point and delays affect the entire chain.
View the yard as a direct conduit to your customers. Along with being highly interconnected, the yard is also a critical juncture between your company and its customers. Many times, in fact, a truck that’s leaving the yard will be your firm’s last contact with its products and your customers’ first interaction with the delivery. Make it a good one.
Use technology to create a highly-automated, digital yard. With a cloud-based Yard Management System (YMS) as a foundation— and adding unmanned drones, passive radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, real-time location systems (RTLS), and other digital tools to the mix—the digital yard enables organizations to share crucial information with other supply chain systems in real-time and allows companies to gain a holistic enterprise perspective.
Empower your carriers to participate in the ecosystem. Everyone wants to increase their customer focus and do what’s right by their clients. They’re all dealing with the Amazon Effect, and being pushed hard to maintain high levels of accuracy while operating at very high velocities. But how does a company go about setting up a transparent framework for achieving that goal? That’s where yard technology and automation come into the picture by empowering carriers and allowing them to seamlessly participate in your company’s ecosystem (while at the same time managing their own piece of the operation).

In this rapid changing environment, the only way to stay competitive, drive superior performance, and better serve your customers is by combining automation and investment in digital technologies. Thanks to advancements in technology including cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), drones, and mobile, the digital yard management experience is now real-time, data-driven, automated, integrated, and connected. It also provides immediate value to both warehouse and transportation operations and across the enterprise. We’ve seen that this is an important win in a distribution environment where efficiency, agility, and flexibility are a must.

Matt Yearling is CEO of PINC Solutions. He joined PINC as chief executive officer in March 2013 and is responsible for the overall strategic and operational management of the company. Matt’s past roles include vice president and general manager of Encryption Products at Symantec Corporation, senior vice president of Global CRM Product Development at Sage Inc., Chief Technology Officer for Embarcadero Systems Corp (a Ports America company). As vice president of Oracle On Demand, Matt played a pivotal role in making it Oracle’s fastest growing line-of-business.

The Four Stages of Digital Disruption in the Supply Chain

Guest Commentary | By Matt Yearling • 04/14/2016

Organizations continue to look for areas of opportunity and inspiration on the quest to improve the operational efficiency of their supply chain. While technology capabilities are plentiful, for many, it’s not immediately obvious where one should start. What I have attempted to do here is provide a staged view on how I would categorize significant technology enablement, with one category potentially building upon the other.

Managed – The first place to start is to implement a software package that is capable of managing repeatable processes consistently across your organization. This provides the basis for managing and refining processes. Unfortunately, most organizations place too much emphasis on data that is sourced from human input, which is prone to error. This degrades the quality and potential insight the data could provide. This data often resides in siloes of information, focusing on a specific function, such as warehouse automation. Connecting these islands of information makes every such investment more valuable.Connecting data from related systems is not as hard as it used to be thanks to modern web services based integration technologies. Now you can do in days what used to take weeks of programming. We encounter so many organizations suffering from delays and errors caused by reliance on people to double enter information into multiple, disconnected systems. Eliminate islands of information to get a holistic view of your supply chain.

Assisted – Next, let sensors take care of the timely and accurate input of operational information, assisting the flow and management of information in the software, and avoiding the need for workers to input data manually. Thanks to the rise in awareness of sensors in IoT technology, organizations have a multitude of ways to Auto-ID and locate assets. The beauty of using sensor technology in place of manually entered data results in high quality data that you can depend on. Today we see RFID, GPS, OCR, and Barcode technology as being pervasive. As a provider of YMS technology we appreciate the value of knowing where assets are in real-time. Drivers only make money when they are on the road, so they have a habit of dropping trailers in the first open spot they see, not always where they are directed. Real-Time Location Technology System (RTLS) technology uses sensors to provide a way to validate actual locations versus desired locations, which saves a lot of wasted time, fuel, and product quality (in the case of fresh produce).

Automated – In case you have software, you can understand a business process. Sensors collect information. You can take the understanding of the process, together with sensor information a step further in the form of a an automated worker. We see practical examples of this in the supply chain operations all the time – like parcel sorting, product packaging, automated guided vehicles, robotic lift trucks, etc. The key here is taking a repetitive mundane job and have an autonomous robot execute it in a more efficient way. For my company, our approach is the utilization of drone technology to automate the identification and reconciliation of hard to reach inventory.

Optimized – Now you have tools in place to automate processes, sensors to capture events, and robots to automate (where appropriate), what do you do with this information overload? Take a holistic enterprise perspective. You now have this data feed of enterprise grade tools that enables your organization to navigate a path of continued improvement and to provide transparent engagement with partners. Managing enterprise wide metrics, best practices, process execution, flow of information and inventory, provides the business guidance on the continuous path of continuous organizational optimization.

These are exciting times in the supply chain industry as complex challenges can now be tackled using technology more simply than ever before.

Matt Yearling joined PINC Solutions as chief executive officer in March 2013 and is responsible for the overall strategic and operational management of the company. Matt’s past roles include vice president and general manager of Encryption Products at Symantec Corporation, senior vice president of Global CRM Product Development at Sage Inc., Chief Technology Officer for Embarcadero Systems Corp (a Ports America company). As vice president of Oracle On Demand Matt played a pivotal role in making it Oracle’s fastest growing line-of-business.

The Three Pillars of Supply Chain Execution

Guest Commentary | By Matt Yearling • 12/08/2015

We all know that Supply Chain Execution (SCE) is composed of Warehouse, Yard and Transportation management components. But have you ever considered the relative importance of these three components? Even though organizations usually prioritize their Yard Management System (YMS) as the final component of this trio, implementing an enterprise YMS is just the beginning of the journey of engendering execution excellence across an organization’s supply chain.

Below are the three key considerations that make the Yard Management System the core enabler of optimal execution efficiency:

Providing real-time feedback to planning systems -The YMS operates at the intersection of an organization’s’ warehouse and transportation functions. The TMS, for example, schedules a gate time for the carrier. But it is the YMS that captures the actual arrival time and can determine the variances and associated trends.
Connecting the dots – Yards are complex environments that play a critical role as the nexus between transportation and the warehouse. The YMS can unify disparate warehouse and transportation management systems from multiple vendors. A YMS needs to adapt to the specific objectives for each yard it serves.
The Network View – A traditional YMS needs to provide deep visibility into the execution of operations within each facility. Contrast this to an enterprise YMS, which provides the added view across all locations and the operational relationships between sites. Organizations are now able to derive best practice adoption by comparing operational KPIs for all locations.

Traditionally, the yard and YMS has been relegated to being simply an extension to either the TMS or the WMS. This dependency prevents organizations from gaining vital insights into critical yard operations that impact the effectiveness of overall supply chain execution.

Yard Management Solutions Impose Control on an Inherently Chaotic Process

Transportation Management Systems | By Steve Banker • 10/29/2012

As Chris Jones from Descartes said in a Logistics Viewpoints column, the Forrest Gump quote — “Life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get” — applies to the challenge of managing a yard, particularly inbound dock operations.

A yard management system (YMS) controls the yard attached to a warehouse or distribution center (DC). YMS functionality includes dock door scheduling, check in and check out, location of trailers in the yards, trailer asset management, and efficiently moving trucks and trailers to and from dock doors. A YMS can save companies money through reduced detention fees, improved yard labor efficiencies, and better warehouse utilization.

There are four distinct groups of YMS vendors. First off, there are standalone vendors. Some are more focused on deep software functionality, such as Zebra Technologies and C3 Solutions, and others are more focused on providing real time location asset visibility, such as PINC Solutions and Exotrac.

I was briefed recently by both Zebra and Exotrac. What impressed me about Zebra’s solution was the intuitive, easy-to-use configuration engine that Zebra uses to accomplish complex yard optimization. Exotrac, in turn, provides a low-priced system that is well suited for 3PLs, with a real time location system based on GPS.

Several warehouse management system (WMS) vendors also provide YMS solutions, including RedPrairie, Manhattan Associates, HighJump Software, SAP, and Oracle.

An ARC client mentioned that they had seen a detailed demonstration of RedPrairie’s YMS capabilities and were impressed. Basically, RedPrairie has taken the task management, inventory management, and waving capabilities that are core to its WMS and extended them out to cover yard activities. This has allowed RedPrairie to have the kind of robust yard functionality historically associated with a Zebra or C3 solution.

Transportation management system (TMS) vendors also offer a subset of YMS functionality; most offer web based dock scheduling. A robust dock door scheduling system does not hard schedule a truck for a particular dock door. Rather, the YMS should fill the open time slots in such a way that the dock doors are fully scheduled, but also allows for more flexibility later if trucks arrive early or late.

Most TMS suppliers offer web based dock scheduling. However, Descartes and JDA Software both offer more holistic solutions to the dock door scheduling problem. Descartes calls its solution “Logistics Flow Control.” Descartes argues that retailers that use a web-based dock scheduling portal will often have synchronization problems. Here is how Chris Jones described it in his guest commentary:

The LTL carrier typically cannot schedule an appointment until it has knowledge of the shipment, which typically means goods in hand and evaluation all of the deliveries it needs to make. At that point, because of DC capacity constraints, the retailer/distributor’s schedule may not offer a delivery window that makes the contracted date. Or the LTL carrier is not aware of the impact of “slight” changes to the delivery date, and changes it to allow more deliveries to be consolidated before scheduling an appointment. In the end, the goods fail to show up on time and depending upon the contractual agreement, fines are levied on the bewildered supplier.

JDA, in turn, has recently released a more granular, constraint-based dock door scheduling solution than I have seen from other YMS suppliers. With existing transportation management systems, if the dock manager changes the dock schedule, the optimization in a TMS begins to unravel. By attempting to preserve the freight savings associated with a transportation plan, JDA’s solution can potentially save companies more money than a traditional YMS would achieve.

Finally, the last category of yard solution involves managed services. C.H. Robinson, for example, offers dock scheduling managed services from the shipper’s perspective. The problem shippers face, particularly consumer goods companies, is that the retailers they work with all have different appointment scheduling systems, which makes scheduling tedious and inefficient. Several of C.H. Robinson’s clients have decided they don’t want their transportation planners engaged in appointment scheduling for two reasons. First of all, transportation planners can get busy putting out fires. When this occurs, planners often do not get around to appointment scheduling until late in the day, at which point the slots they want might be gone. Secondly, transportation planners make a good salary, so it is less expensive to outsource this task.

In conclusion, there is a lot going on in the yard solutions space, far more than I suspected when I began researching this article.

(Note: C.H. Robinson, Descartes Systems, HighJump Software, JDA Software, Manhattan Associates, Oracle, RedPrairie, and SAP are ARC clients and/or Logistics Viewpoints sponsors).

How to Improve Yard Management

Logistics Technologies | By Steve Banker • 09/23/2009

The benefits from Yard Management Systems (YMS) are driven by their ability to enhance five key processes within the yard. Here are some of the key benefits in those different process areas:

YMS Improves 5 Processes Within the Yard (click to enlarge image)

On-Line Dock Door Appointment Booking

A best practice, which is more common in Europe, is to have carriers book delivery appointments within a narrow window, the load is tipped on arrival, and the driver departs with an empty trailer. This practice is less common in North America, where yards are larger and can accommodate drop trailers waiting to be unloaded. Trailers tend to sit in the yard for a couple of days. However, having fully loaded trailers sitting in the yard acting as a safety buffer between transportation and warehouse processes is inherently poor practice.

Often, carriers book appointments by telephone, which can require a full time clerk, who handles between 200 and 300 appointments a day. A best practice is to have carriers or suppliers book appointments online. Leading yard management systems identify the best dock door for unloading and put-away, and enforce capacity constraints for that dock.

Gate Reception

Traditionally, a yard gate is manned by a security guard that tells inbound drivers where to park. The driver parks and then delivers his paperwork to the office. However, until these documents are processed, no one has visibility into what loads are currently sitting in the yard. Best practice automates this check-in process by eliminating unwieldy paperwork and inventory blind spots. In some cases, all that is required is a trailer and driver ID, which the system matches to data from the TMS and procurement systems to fully identify the load. The second benefit of logging in the truck at the gate is that the warehouse gets the earliest visibility that the load has arrived. If this load contains “out of stock” items, then the “live” load can be immediately routed to an inbound dock, improving warehouse and supply chain performance.

Visibility of Loads in the Yard

Most yard managers have stories of finding trailers in the yard containing loads that they knew nothing about. Even worse, if the trailer is a reefer, then the fuel will have expired long ago and the load will be spoiled, which creates additional removal and disposal costs. The knock-on effect of losing a load probably means that there was either a stock-out in the warehouse, or a customer was short-shipped, and in both cases sales were lost.

Companies, especially those that have a problem with shrinkage, have a clerk audit what trailers are sitting in their yard every two hours. Yard management systems provide visibility of what trailers and what stock is actually sitting in the yard, obviating both problems.

Yard management systems can also provide visibility of reefer fuel levels, with alerts to inform managers when the reefer fuel is about to expire. Again, this proactive approach can dramatically reduce the number of spoilt loads.

Visibility of Upcoming Demurrage/Detention Charges

The ability to control container demurrage and trailer detention costs is a cost bucket that companies should and can manage better. The first challenge is the ability to identify containers and trailers that are about to incur additional charges, so that these can be unloaded and released in time. However, whether or not these containers and trailers should be unloaded depends on the current priority of the tasks in the warehouse. For example, bringing forward the unloading might result in delaying fulfillment of a customer’s order. Therefore, identifying the best action requires tight integration and coordination with warehouse processes.

Maximize Throughput Capacity of the Yard

For most yard managers, the number of daily ins and outs is increasing, and is unlikely to decrease. Particularly in Europe, where land close to highways or motorways is expensive, yards tend to be relatively small. The combination of improved dock door scheduling, and visibility of empty trailers sitting idle in the yard, enables yard throughput to be increased. Typically yard management systems generate a 20 percent throughput increase. The cost benefit of avoiding additional building construction or renting/acquiring satellite yards can often justify the investment in yard management systems.

(This posting is an excerpt from a white paper—“How to Improve Yard and Supply Chain Performance”—ARC published last year on behalf of Sterling Commerce. The author, Simon Bragg, identifies several other benefits of YMS and also discusses the benefits of buying an on-demand solution versus a traditional, internally-deployed solution. You can register to download the full report here under the Sterling Multi-Channel Fulfillment section).

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