Things to Consider (below on this page) is a short article discussing yard management which may help you kick start your own discussions and develop your strategy for improving yard management.
The internal questionnaire may help you gather information in your department and organization to see if there are operational, economic and customer service benefits to implementing or improving distribution center management.
The distance between your warehouse and the fence line may be the most expensive mile in your supply chain. ©2002
We talk to many people about yard management. These Consideration pages are intended to help you determine how to assess your yard management project and give you ideas on how to approach the process. There are questions you might ask yourself, others in your department and people within your organization when considering a yard management system.
Understanding yard management needs can be simple, somewhat involved or complex. Similar tasks like loading and unloading trailers and containers vary widely from company to company, industry to industry and even within the same company from location to location.
Reasons for differences include customer demands, labor quality, worker availability and work rules. Geographic differences (Wyoming vs. New York Metro) require different processes to meet the demands of your internal and external customers.
As Yard Management is outside the physical walls of the warehouse or distribution center, it might belong to transportation, or distribution, or warehouse or might be outsourced to a third party.
What determines your need for a yard management system is particular to your operation.
Things to Consider
Who is currently asking for yard information?
Security might want to know when events occurred. Is history quickly and readily available? Customer Service may want to be able to tell the customer that the products are on the yard, will be received today and shipped tomorrow. Operations may want to know when equipment is leaving the yard to isolate and solve late delivery problems.
Carriers may be constantly calling to find out if a load is ready to go, or an empty ready to pick up which interrupts everyone's work flow.
For 1 morning or 1 day have your staff log all requests for information that involves yard management and note the approximate time it took to satisfy the request and briefly list the resources used to satisfy the request.
Do you have specific problems that must be solved, or process improvements to meet commitments?
Is trailer or container detention, demurrage or per diem charges a problem to solve?
If your organization committed to provide visibility to customers and you want them to be able to log on to a web page and "see" the status of their outbound loads, this would be a process improvement.
If your staff is spending too much time faxing or answering phone calls regarding load or equipment status this would be problem to solve.
Are yard operations, equipment switching (a.k.a. jockeying, hostling, shunting) efficient and operating at as low a cost as possible? Do you have a way to monitor productivity between drivers, shifts, etc.?
Look at costs such as detention and rental equipment. Track a week of effort to fax and communicate with carriers. Do you have other systems in place that bring these issues to your attention and help you solve them?
What other departments and systems would you interact with?
If you could find a yard management system that would have inter department benefits, how would that help you reduce costs, improve service or allow you to run faster?
If other departments take your daily yard inventory and then work with it's information to produce similar or redundant reports how would further automating the process reduce their costs and improve accuracy?
Do you have the right resources to effectively use yard management?
As with any real or near time data system, data integrity is critical for the software to produce meaningful information results. Will management make the commitment?
Will you rely on 3rd party guards to perform critical data entry for equipment arriving and departing?
What I.T. requirements are there? What will you require of your I.T. resources? Are they available, can you get their support? Can you consider having YardView host the software?
Have you in-house solutions in the past?
What worked with the in-house solutions? What didn't work with the in-house solutions? If you're still considering an in-house solution and you tried one in the past, what is different now?
When do you want a solution? If you have a seasonal peak period you probably want to introduce a new process and new training at a different time of the year.
Organize your needs, wants and requirements in a hierarchy of savings and benefits.
If you want or need help including basic yard management requirements, contact us.