Week 6: Yard Management

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.

Since the start of the RTV journey, the percentage of trucks who spent more than 2h at the site has already fallen by 35% when looking at weekly median numbers.

Week 5: ETA

We are entering the second month of our visibility journey with Varel and Schoellershammer. Our carriers are onboarded and the majority of our tours are ready for tracking. Now it’s time to take a deeper look at one of our key services: our machine-learning ETA. 

In recent years, thanks to the proliferation of ride-hailing and food delivery services, supplying customers with a real-time estimated time of arrival (ETA) of shipments has become the norm. In the logistics industry, however, use of ETAs extends far beyond increased customer satisfaction. Knowledge of a cargo's accurate arrival time can help distribution centres and warehouses to better allocate their resources and enables customer service staff to discuss with customers how they can plan changes in late deliveries before they cause any serious problems.

Getting to perfect ETA’s is as much of a journey as the other parts of real time visibility. Let's face it — reality is complicated and a lot of unexpected things can happen during a transport. In the real world, there’s never a complete set of high quality data across all ETA calculation building blocks. However, our customers dont have to walk this journey alone.

Sixfold has a dedicated team of domain and machine learning experts that have lots of experience in making ETA’s work for you. Usually, after a few iterations, the issues go away and the customer can start improving their existing processes while being confident that their ETAs are accurate.

"Things are looking good for our #followmyprogress customers! We have calculated more than 100k ETAs for them within the first month and they realized a working accuracy level of more than 95%!"
— Maksim, Sixfold Lead Data-Scientist.

To read more on our famous machine learning ETA and the magic behind its calculation, read our ETA whitepapers.

    Read more herE     

Things are looking good for Schoellershammer!

The ETA is working for 98% of their tours - they are definitely ready to start exploring all the exiting possibilities that are being offered by real-time accurate ETAs.

Week 4: Transport Visibility

After a few weeks into a real-time visibility project the majority of our customers’ carrier base is usually onboarded. At this point of time we are then jointly shifting from scaling to fine tuning. In order to do so we enable our customers to utilize RTV performance reporting. The main feature of this report is the visibility index. It provides insight on what share of the transport was monitored in real-time. A visibility index of 100% indicates that real-time visibility was provided over the entire course of the transpor, while 0% means that no part of the transport was visible.

The index itself consists of three main parameters which determine the result for each transport.

Visibility

Ensuring trackability of a transport by providing all necessary information is key and the first step to a great visibility index score.

Visibility Time

The visibility time defines the timeframe for which real-time visibility was provided. Starting to provide visibility after half of the transport route equals a visibility time of 50%.

Visibility Quality

This parameter is determined by the frequency of GPS signals we receive. Dedicated quality standards have to be met in order to provide full visibility quality.

Last week Schoellershammer has achieved a solid 33% visibility score - that means that they are fully tracking one third of their logistics operations within just 3 weeks! 70% of their tours had high visibility scores (>80%), with one carrier achieving a promising 92% visibility score across all transports.

We strive to provide as much REAL-time visibility as possible. It's not enough to simply track to completion, but to provide seamless and issue-free tracking across all transports. Therefore, we created the visibility index in order to:

  • enable all stakeholders to understand what level of real-time visibility their transports currently receive;
  • point out detailed actions and recommendations on how to increase the level of real-time visibility.

 

Week 3: Addresses and Geofences

One of the prerequisites for tracking a transport successfully is accurately determining the location of the stops and further detecting arrivals and departures. In order to do so, the first step is to transform stop addresses into geo coordinates. This process is called geocoding. 

Apart from the accurate location, it is crucial to define the optimal area where a trucks’ arrival is expected. Those areas are represented by virtual perimeters, so-called geofences. Based on geofences, arrivals and departures are detected. 

Sixfold’s geofencing approach is unique in many ways. First of all, we focus on automation and self-learning technologies. All geofences are set up automatically based on address data - depending on address quality the size of the geofence is adjusted automatically to make sure that no truck movement is missed due to master data inconsistencies. However, automation is not enough - accuracy plays a key role in detecting actual arrival and departure times. By applying behavioural analyses within geofences, we do make sure that arrivals and departures are not triggered by simply entering and leaving the geofence but rather when trucks stop for loading and unloading.

Even though we do make sure that bad data does not lead to bad tracking, we do provide detailed reports about data inconsistencies. This enables our customers to adjust master data in their systems.

Schoellershammer is an almost perfect customer in terms of address quality. So far, we could only detect six addresses with incorrect address data. We were able to point out those addresses while still ensuring real-time tracking. 

Week 2: Onboarding

Carrier onboarding is the first focus topic of our journey and the key to success in every real-time visibility project. By getting all carriers onboard we enable our customers to get full transparency over their operations. A fully onboarded carrier base is necessary to make data driven decisions and leverage gathered data when eventually combining RTV and execution.

About SCHOELLERSHAMMER 

The combination of Transporeon as execution platform and Sixfold as ETA and RTV data provider was the key benefit for us to choose RTV by Sixfold and Transporeon. Including RTV Information into our daily operations will improve our on-site yard processes and improve customer experience. We are excited to kick-off the journey!” 

Frank Vogeler, Head of Logistics at Schoellershammer

Week 1: Project Kick-off

See what was on our agenda to kick-off the project:

  • Project roadmap & milestones
  • Definition Project KPIs
  • Carrier onboarding strategy
  • RTV focus areas for Schoellershammer

We started our journey by defining common goals and plans to ensure that we can accomplish them as soon as possible. The main focus was carrier onboarding in order to make sure that RTV data is available for most of the transports from day one.

Stay tuned to learn more about the advantages Transporeon and Sixfold customers have when starting a project. In our next post we will share more details about our powerful network and show you how easy and smooth carrier onboarding can be.

Stay tuned for the progress!

About SCHOELLERSHAMMER

A historic paper mill founded in 1784, is committed to conserving resources through the circular economy. Today they process waste paper from around 4 million inhabitants into packaging paper that is valued by customers all over the world.

As a traditional family-run business, SCHOELLERSHAMMER prides itself on its high levels of customer satisfaction, product quality, and optimal service as well as a high sense of responsibility for nature, people and the region.