Tales From The Yard Installment

At a nine-acre facility in North Jersey, humidity was thick and it was about to downpour. We had been in the office waiting for the “Yard Check” guy to bring us paper listing the trailers and the spots. Melissa and I looked at each other over our Dunkin Donuts cups…this is taking too long it was now 3am and the length between updates were increasing. We decided it was a bust, explained to the operation it was a mistake to have the person losing his job once the system was implemented be the one responsible for the data (seems obvious now). So we scratched the entire thing and made a plan for the next day to split into teams of two, split up the yard and knock out the initial inbounding of all inventory.

At 10pm the next day when the yard slowed to a crawl we jumped into our cars with a tablet; one person to record the trailer the other to navigate. The rain came with a vengeance, the yard was dark uneven and the poor driver had to jump out and check every trailer for a seal while the recorder entered the data into the system. Two grueling hours later it was over we had a couple spotters do a yard check using the smart client. With very few exceptions the Yard check was complete and the facility was “Live”. It was a victory!