Yard operations are one of the major potential bottlenecks in supply chains, and optimising them is key to ensuring low costs and on-time deliveries. Luckily, real-time visibility can help out here in a couple of ways.
Space constraints at loading docks can easily lead to congestion and delays. This is one of the core problems our predictive ETAs help our customers out with. When incoming trucks are delayed, our ETAs enable the warehouse team to reprioritise tasks and optimize their load preparation processes
Using the predictive ETAs of incoming trucks to organise the yard’s work means that rather than idly waiting for a truck that’s stuck in traffic, the warehouse team can adapt to the real-time situation and instead prepare for and then load or unload other transports. As a result, dwell times of trucks go down, meaning higher asset utilisation rates for carriers and the avoidance of surcharges or detention fees for customers.
The yard management capabilities that are powered by Sixfold’s real-time visibility let the customer both see the trucks loading or waiting at a site at any given moment, as well as to see the ordered list of incoming trucks. Furthermore, our system even shows the customer predictions on who will be at the site in e.g. 2 hours from now, predicting future problems such as overloaded parking lots and longer-than-agreed dwell times. Having this information available ahead of time thanks to predictions allows for the yard to reallocate resources, reschedule arrivals and more.
Finally, after a truck has left the site, our real-time visibility data allows for an after-the-fact analysis of the movement patterns of trucks at the site, as well as quantifying things like overloaded parking lots, times spent at those parking lots, at each individual dock or gate, and much more.