As customer expectations rise and delivery windows shrink, companies must reevaluate how goods transfer in and out of their transportation hubs. Yards and facilities remain at the heart of these transfer points. When goods are delayed while inside a facility, it impacts the entire flow of goods. These delays are also called
With the continued focus on reducing costs, improving operational efficiency, and enhancing visibility, how companies manage their transportation hubs is becoming more scrutinized. Even if your operations seem efficient, there’s always an opportunity to leverage technology for further enhancement.
Identifying choke points in the supply chain
The yard can be a black box, but it doesn’t have to be. Your facilities and yards are a central part of your supply chain operations and choke points can be felt at many phases of the operation – during pre-arrival, at the gate, within the yard, with spotter or live drivers and at dock doors. While you may already be using truckload visibility to manage your goods in motion, many shippers struggle to gain visibility into their goods while resting inside their facility.
When choke points occur during inbound and outbound inventory transfers, supply chains can incur high detention costs, miss critical delivery windows, and ultimately cannot meet customer expectations, all due to a lack of operational efficiency. Shippers can start by evaluating the ways in which drivers enter the facility gate and see how manual or time consuming the process is for warehouse personnel and truck drivers.
How Yard Management helps improve transfer point efficiency
Digitizing your facility and warehouse management reduces persistent choke points. A cloud-based solution can make it easy to manage all your physical operations from one place and provides a comprehensive view of the facility and real-time visibility to assets like containers, trailers, and chassis. A digital yard management solution can streamline and automate crucial phases of your facility operations that experience choke points.
At pre-arrival
With predictive ETAs, warehouse teams gain upstream visibility into truck arrival times and can pre-plan to avoid delays. Foresight into shipment arrivals makes for more efficient appointment management and labor planning, ensuring the right personnel are staffed during peak hours. With accurate arrival times, facility managers can schedule dock workers, accordingly, leading to cost reductions and enhanced operational efficiency.
At the gate
A persistent challenge is managing the influx of trucks inbound to a facility each day. To offset the long wait times, carriers can use driver pre-check in to pre-check in to a facility using their mobile devices, generating a QR code with pick up details like assigned dock door location and trailer location. As a result, less staff are needed to facilitate gate operations.
At the dock
When inventory enters a facility, it can be a challenge for dock workers to know which trailers to prioritize unloading first. Without knowing which trailers are considered
In the yard
It’s important to have fast production throughput to ensure goods do not dwell in the yard. With real-time data on all your trailers and assets, you can monitor the last free day details directly from the platform, that will help prevent costly detention container costs.
Whether you are shipping consumer packaged goods, retail products, or manufacturing goods, transfer point efficiency is critical to your operations. project44 empowers shippers to evaluate where in their production process they can benefit from a yard management solution and applies data and automation to streamline and automate critical yard processes.
Learn more about project44 Facilities here.
