Plan, monitor and control all yard movements, with and without shunters. You will see, it is very hard to achieve it without a yard management system.
But what are the challenges of your yard management and how to meet these challenges?
Do you call the depot or do you have a graphical interface that displays and informs you conveniently about the current yard situation?
Or do your drivers receive clear unambiguous instructions via a mobile application?
Or can you see the current positions of all loading units with their loading statuses by pressing a button?
"Are these also topics that cause inefficiencies in your Yard Management operation? In the following Case Study you can read how you can master these operational challenges with the right software.".
Peter Phillips (Business Solutions Manager)
KRATZER AUTOMATION
Adam H. manages the central depot of a transport and logistics organization serving the retail sector. The site serves as a regional distribution center for larger markets and customers. It has 60 gates that are available for inbound (arrival) and outbound activities (departure). The delivered goods are transshipped and stored here temporarily.
Whilst the vehicles are waiting at the gates the goods information for the loading and the internal transfer is missing.
In addition, the depot staff has to know if other services (goods check, weighing, additional documentation etc.) have to be provided. It delays the transfer and blocks the gates.
As the number of gates is never enough for the amount of transshipment processes it is usual to have long waiting times at the gates.
What is especially bad for Adam H., the depot manager, is the waiting times of his own vehicles. From 09:00 until 15:00 many of his vehicles have to wait up to one hour as numerous depot gates were occupied by the loading and unloading processes of other vehicles.
This amounts to a 50 euro downtime cost for every hour for each vehicle. On bad days the downtime costs can reach up to 1, 000 euros.
As the lack of gates for outbound goods represents the biggest problem Adam has transformed his own fleet into swap body vehicles.
The swap bodies are preloaded by the depot staff and this means that the drivers have only to exchange the swap bodies. By doing this the loading process can occur smoothly throughout the day and there is no problematical waiting times at the gates anymore.
New challenges arise now during the correct assignment of swap bodies to the carrier vehicles. The hand-written documentation is subject to errors. A reliable overview of the yard together with the swap bodies that are in use or that have already been loaded is missing.
The other crucial issue is to effectively manage the newly purchased shunters.
The movements of the swap bodies have to be coordinated and documented along with the loading processes.
The required communication with the drivers of the shunters, the depot staff and the yard dispatching team occurs via radio communication. But errors due to communication misunderstandings often lead to confusion during the movement of loading units.
It is therefore important to optimize this process. Until now yard dispatching has occurred using written notes and Excel lists. A new effective software solutions is on the way, cadisYM.
The communication between yard dispatcher, transshipment and depot shunting vehicles now occurs seamlessly and reliably. The driver receives the transshipment orders on the display of his tablet and processes them.
The yard staff records the completion of loading and unloading via the App and can request the loading or unloading of a swap body. The app reports the actual storage location of the swap body on the site. The movements of the swap bodies are now visible within cadis and safely documented for all participants to see.
Dispatching of transshipment vehicles has become easier. Users can view a graphical reproduction of the yard, the depot including gates and storage areas allowing the yard dispatcher to assign the required transshipment vehicles via a mouse click.
The yard dispatcher can track in real time the transshipment processes on the control station interface. In addition he sees the progression of loading and unloading and the storage locations of the vehicles on site. Using this data he can act and react in a fast and efficient way.
The workload and error rate of the yard dispatcher has been reduced considerably.
The information gap between the arrival of the vehicle and the unloading process at the depot can also be closed with cadis. The gate keeper enters the information that is required on arrival of the vehicle on an easy-to-use screen. The yard worker now sees on their tablet the goods, the gate and which vehicle or swap body the loading or unloading process has to be executed.
The documentation of the quality of the goods together with potential damages occurs digitally and is recorded automatically.
Daniel L. (Yard dispatcher): „With the desktop application and the app I have all my yard movements and activities under control. I send the orders to the shunting vehicles by pressing a button – The results are high productivity of the operational processes on the yard and reduced downtimes.“
